Doctors' information: excessive, crummy, and bent

This theme issue of the BMJ considers the mess that is medical information.

Al Gore, vice president of the United States, has described the mess better than anybody. “Our current information policy,” he said, “resembles the worst aspects of our old agricultural policy, which left grain rotting in thousands of storage files while people were starving. We have warehouses of unused information ‘rotting’ while critical questions are left unanswered and critical problems are left unresolved.” We have much too much information of poor quality, too little that's good, and …