Stanford Multidisciplinary Seminars in Digestive Diseases and Sciences

Excerpt

Long gone are the days where the clinical gastroenterologist was operating ex vacuo, based solely on his own history and physical examination. Nowadays, a patient with symptoms suggestive of a digestive or liver disease will be referred for consultation by a gastroenterologist or hepatologist and will likely undergo a series of tests, starting with serologic or blood assays and various imaging studies, often proceeding to endoscopy and mucosal biopsies, before a diagnosis is made and a plan of therapy instituted. Increasingly today, the busy clinician accesses the information from all these ancillary studies electronically and synthesizes the information prior to decision-making. The opportunity to interact and exchange ideas, concepts, and alternative ways of diagnosis and therapy among colleagues from various disciplines relevant to gastroenterology and hepatology is becoming less frequent in our days that are consumed by increasing patient loads, a high endoscopy volume, and more administrative duties. The opportunity to learn, remember, and eventually implement a new strategy based on such a multidisciplinary interaction is left hidden in the academic confines of a weekly case-based conference, but attendance is often hampered by family or personal obligations for many physicians. …