Retired senior physicians have vast experience and are familiar with the network of their medical community. In addition, they have time. In past decades, experience and time no longer counted when a person retired. Without an office to go to, a staff to guide and an official telephone to call from, retired senior physicians often abandoned medicine altogether.

The Internet has changed this situation radically. Retired physicians stay connected to their community. They now have an information highway where they can share their experience and they have time - an immense advantage over their younger colleagues. In today's world of limited time resources, people with time are capable of getting things done others wouldn't even dream of.

Free time can be used to improve medicine. One of the aspects in modern medicine that might need to be improved is the free availability of medical textbooks. Fortunately, physicians can now control the entire process of producing and publishing a medical textbook and do not need the intervention of a medical publisher.

Retired senior physicians may not wish to do the groundwork of writing 500 or more pages. But they are in a good position to conceive the structure of a modern textbook and to form a team of colleagues who are willing to participate.

Recent successful examples of such "physician-made" free textbooks are HIV Medicine 2005, Influenza Report 2006, and SARS Reference 2003.

A detailed guide about how physicians should proceed to produce and publish a medical textbook has recently been published under the name Free Medical Information.

For further information and support, please contact Bernd Sebastian Kamps at the email address you know.