Cyber medicine in Telemedicine

1. Cyber Medicine

2. Cyber Medicine
• Ndukwe (2005) defines Cyber Medicine as all medications via the
Internet whether in the form of doctors' consultation or in the
form of seeking medicine information via an Internet website or
the ordering or buying of drugs via an Internet pharmacy.
• To summarise, cyber medicine is an instrument for do it yourself
healthcare"
• Cyber medicine is used to deliver medical services, such as
medical consultations and drug prescriptions.
• It is the successor to telemedicine, wherein patients in the early
days would consult doctor remotely via telephone or fax and get
treatment.
• The concept of cyber medicine is not new and has been
practiced from the time the email got estabilished.

3. Cyber Medicine
• A cyber doctor or a cyber physician, is a medical
professional who does consultation via the internet,
treating virtual patients, who may never meet face
to face.
• This is not only a new area of medicine but a new
concept which is being utilised by the armed forces
and teaching hospitals.
• The cyber doctor offers online consultation to
patients before advising them to travel for
treatment.

4. Cyber Medicine
• The concept of cyber medicine is a specialty at the crossroads of
medical informatics and public health, denoted as medicine in
cyberspace, where "cyberspace" denotes the Internet.
• Cyber medicine, an emerging academic field in the intersection
of medical informatics and public health, and some overlap with
telemedicine (adapted from Eysenbach, et al., 1999).
• Cyber Medicine is defined as "the science of applying Internet
and global networking technologies to medicine and public
health, of studying the impact and implications of the Internet
to educate and communicate in ways that promote medical
practice, commerce, scholarship and empowerment, and of
evaluating opportunities and the challenges for healthcare" (Soe,
2004).

5. Cyber Medicine
• In other words, cyber medicine is the exploration
and exploitation for consumer health education,
patient self-support, professional medical education
and research, the evaluation of the quality of
medical information on the Internet, the impact of
the Internet on the patient-physician relationship
and quality of healthcare and the use of global
networking for evidence-based medicine
(Eysenbach, et al., 1999).

6. Cyber Medicine
• Cyber medicine as defined by Bauer (2004) states that
"cyber medicine in simple terms is the practice of
medicine within cyberspace. C
• yber medicine can also be defined more widely to include
other forms of distance medicine (telemedicine) that are
not limited to the use of computers and the Internet.
• In particular, cyber medicine can go beyond electronic
patient record system to information management and
communication technologies to facilitate physician-
patient communications".

7. Cyber Medicine
• In other words, cyber medicine is the exploration
and exploitation of the Internet for consumer
health education, patient self-support, professional
medical education and research, the evaluation of
the quality of medical information on the Internet,
the impact of the Internet on the patient-physician
relationship and quality of healthcare and the use
of global networking for evidence-based medicine
(Eysenbach, et al., 1999).

8. Cyber Medicine
• Cyber medicine as defined by Bauer (2004) states that
"cyber medicine in simple terms is the practice of
medicine within cyberspace.
• Cyber medicine can also be defined more widely to
include other forms of distance medicine (telemedicine)
that are not limited to the use of computers and the
Internet.
• In particular, cyber medicine can go beyond electronic
patient record system to information management and
communication technologies to facilitate physician-
patient communications".

9. Types of Cyber medicine
• Information-oriented Sites
• The websites that give medical information about some
sickness or drugs are the most popular.
• Patients log in these sites to know about their illness and
make use of the information in the treatment of their
sickness.
• Patients often find the information in these websites as
useful in view of the healing claims made by the websites.
• However, the reliability and authenticity of these websites
is always questionable as many of them have commercial
angle, being sponsored by some advertisers.

10. Types of Cyber medicine
• The consulatation services
• This area of cyber medicine provides a direct communication between
the cyber doctors and their patients.
• The patient gets the medical advice from a doctor or a pharmacist
through these websites.
• The interaction between an online doctor and patient is either
through a medical questionnaire or a simultaneous videoconference,
for which a consultation fee is charged by the doctor.
• After the doctor reviews the information provided by the patient, the
doctor issues the prescription which may be processed by an online
pharmacy for actually dispensing the medicine.
• For this type of cyber medicine, the doctor, pharmacy and the patient
may be based in different parts of the country or anywhere in the
world.

11. Types of Cybermedicine
• The e-Pharmacy Sites
• The e-pharmacy sites are actually drug shops.
• They sell two types of drugs: those that do not regime a prescription from a doctor
before the drugs are sold to the patients and those that require a prescription from
the doctor before the drug is sold.
• The payments are usually online with a credit card.
• The e-pharmacy sites are often criticised because of the sales of drugs over the net
without any control. There are policies guiding sales of drugs in various countries.
• In some countries, for example certain drugs cannot be given to a person unless on
doctor's prescription.
• Also, in most of the countries, drugs have to reach certain standards before the
government agrees that it should be sold to the public.
• There are also policies guiding the establishment of pharmaceutical shops. For
instance people with no formal knowledge of medicine are not allowed to operate
pharmaceutical shops.