I was chatting to a friend last night who is a medical practitioner in general practice, together with a couple of partners. He was lamenting the way his work has changed over the past thirty or so years since he qualified. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, doctors were still quite involved in the process of diagnosis and treatment of their patients. They had the benefit of both education and training, and the preponderant majority of consultations ended with the prescription of one of a relatively small number of well-known drugs, the taking of pulse and temperature and/or some reassuring words of comfort or admonition.
Nowadays the position is entirely different. The explosion of information concerning both conditions and their treatment has made it harder for general practitioners to be confident that they are up-to-date and accurate in their assessments. Advances in bioscience, gene technology, laser techniques, materials, cybernetics and other fields of human application have all led medicine beyond its original borders. Moreover, the information gap between doctor and the individual patient has been narrowed and sometimes eliminated by the advent of the internet and the accessibility of data that enables patients to practise self-diagnosis and suggest one or more forms of treatment or therapy. In many respects, the general practitioner has become little more than a forwarding agency, sending patients for ultrasound scans, X-rays, sophisticated tests of body fluids, physiotherapy or specialist diagnosis by a consultant. Apart from sending patients elsewhere, signing passport applications for the healthy and sick-notes for absentee from work, issuing repeat prescriptions and certifying death, there's not much else that he can do.
In contrast, the equivalent-sized IP practice has been vastly assisted by the new technologies over the same period and, while there have been many changes in law and practice over the past thirty or so years, they mainly make the IP practitioner's task easier. Harmonisation of IP rights, the creation of pan-European rights, the growth in popularity of the Patent Cooperation Treaty and the Madrid Agreement/Protocol -- and now even the Hague Agreement -- are of particular note in this regard. "Diagnosis" of legal problems has been greatly facilitated by the internet, where word-search within documents, measures for storage and retrieval, and the availability of both free and commercial searchable databases of relevant treaties, statutes, case law and administrative rulings have meant that, far from acting as little other than a forwarding agency, the small IP practice can handle more work, and handle it more efficiently, than would have been possible in the Bad Old Days. Sending difficult cases to counsel for an opinion is an option -- but one which is exercised only in case of clear need -- and the UK Intellectual Property Office offers its own non-binding, highly competitive, opinions service too.
The conclusion would thus seem to be that, if in the 1970s or 1980s you were faced with a choice of being a medical practitioner in general practice or an IP practitioner with a small firm, you'd be enjoying a higher degree of job satisfaction today if you picked the IP option. Or am I imagining things ...?
