Medical education in Nigeria: are we ready for the paradigm shift?

The information revolution is changing the way medicine is practised globally. Patients can now access the storehouses of knowledge, which hitherto were out of bounds, to acquire, process and use the medical evidence from a variety of sources such as the World Wide Web. The way medicine is being taught is changing. Many medical and dental schools have revised, or are in the process of revising their curricula. The ability to access information resources and apply up to date information, diagnosis and therapeutic protocols to their practice calls for a paradigm shift. Cybermedicine is fast becoming the twenty-first century practice. The challenge is real. If emphasis is being placed on fluency with information technology in the developed countries, learning to use the computer remains, in our opinion, the place to start from in the developing countries.