My Monday evening was spent at an event organised by the London Business School' Healthcare Club, called "Challenging the Status Quo". Andrew Witty, CEO of GlaxoSmithkline, spoke passionately about why drug development and profits do not have to be at the expense of access to medicines in poor countries. His company has been the first global pharmaceutical company to pledge to pool its patents to allow generic manufacture of its drugs in poor countries, and to enforce differential pricing between rich and poor countries. The take home message was that it is possible to change the prevailing practice or norms, even in an industry like pharma.

Sanjay Gupta is a neurosurgeon with a difference and he is changing the norms in a totally different arena. He is most famous for being CNN's chief medical correspondent and his TV programmes and writings are hugely popular in the US for their new angles on healthcare problems around the world. For example, he has followed medics in war zones, and was filmed meeting the Mexican boy, who was thought to be the index case of swine flu, amid global hysteria about the disease. He recently turned down the job to be Surgeon-General in President Obama's staff.

Gupta made two important points. Firstly peer review, the process used by journals to accept and then publish scientific articles, takes too long and is too slow at delivering up-to-date information for mass consumption. Moreover, one study showed that "... although recommendations made by reviewers have considerable influence on the fate of both papers submitted to journals and abstracts submitted to conferences, agreement between reviewers ... was little greater than would be expected by chance alone". In other words, peer review is far from perfect. Therefore, many people (including health professionals) are increasingly gaining their knowledge from alternative sources such as the internet, blogs and Twitter. Secondly, the pressure for news headlines from mass media corporations does not necessarily have to conflict with the need for good quality, science and health information. There is a plethora of health-related news and advice and so there is plenty of room for health professionals to work innovatively with new media to ensure quality of that information. We wholeheartedly agree at trusttheevidence.net. Are you thinking enough about where you get your up-to-date health information from?