Editorial: The right to know. On the freedom of medical information

Information about health and disease has high social value and is, thus, subject to a variety of controls. These influence the freedom of investigators to generate it; of editors and publishers to transmit it; and of professionals and the public to have access to it. Unconstrained research may threaten the social order and evoke legal or political limit setting. Prominent in the present era are the possibilities of dangerous ethical and biological consequences of new knowledge or, perhaps more important, of procedures for obtaining it. Medical information is transmitted through both the mass media and professional journals. Access to both by potential authors is limited by institutionalized mechanisms of social control and the academic-research subculture. An emerging factor is the editor's possible ethical responsibility for material which he accepts for publication. Access to information is determined by what finally is published, as well as membership in informal communication networks. It is also influenced by dependence, due to cost, time limitation and information overload, on prepackaged material presented in texts, anthologies, busy clinician-oriented journals, or commercial, e.g., pharmaceutical firms. The possibility that governments will, in time, become the major distributors as well as generators of medical information raises new questions as to its eventual freedom and control.