Dear Colleagues,
Medical knowledge doubles every few months.
Medical knowledge has been expanding exponentially. Whereas the doubling time was estimated to be 50 years in 1950, it accelerated to 7 years in 1980, 3.5 years in 2010, and a projected 73 days by 2020, according to a 2011 study in Transactions of the American Clinical and Climatological Association.
Most medical physicists want to share latest knowledge with their medical colleagues and with patients, but they face a significant challenge.
Added to this is the proliferation in information through internet as a result it is difficult to quickly reach out to credible source of information. It appears that we are facing challenge of information overload rather than knowledge. It is our responsibility to provide reliable knowledge to our colleagues. This requires identifying and disseminating appropriate contents. Everyone is busy and does not have time to prune various sources to make a decision of what to trust.
In keeping with above and keeping in mind the one of the important outreach targets of the international organizations to be less resourced countries, this newsletter started by IOMP will keep that target audience prominently in focus. We aim at fewer but meaningful information.
What we do not want is this newsletter to have a few tens of pages with information that no one has time to read. Three to six items per issue with very brief information, not more than 300 words each.
Happy reading and please give us your feedback.
Madan Rehani
President, IOMP