SITUATION

Health remains a fundamental question in the history of humanity. Men wish to have a longer and healthier life, which stimulated continuously the medical development. Doctors are always more experimented and medical equipments are constantly innovated, but at the same time parallel medicines multiply: drugs and other miraculous remedies. In this context, the development of the information and communication technologies (ICTs), especially the Internet, encourages a larger circulation of medical knowledge and promotes new processes for communication and international cooperation. A more significant part of medical practice and research which used to be reserved to the experts in this field seems nowadays open to dialogue with a group of patients or associations of patients who testify and demand a larger conference system and decision-making. In this regard, computers and ICTs play a preponderant role and are integrated into the national programs of public health in most of the developed countries. During the latest 20 years, the medical world has mainly mobilized the Internet, as an institutional showcase or as an informative support for the diffusion of medical information. However, the latest generation of health professionals has been trained to medical knowledge, by means of new online servers such as Medline. Therefore, university medical centers, present and active more than ever on the Web, endorse and participate to a new circulation of medical knowledge, which pushes the professional identities, representations and social experiences of health. At the same time, unseen business templates have been developed, relying on the Internet. Thus, a new world of health is being drawn at the age of information, which induces new relationships between the national policies of public health, research institutions and hospital centers, medical manufacturer and suppliers ( incl. Pharmaceutical products), social organisms, education groups, patients associations and social assistance. We cannot propose in this context the synthesis of technological and knowledge progress in this medical field which is subject to constant mutation. Actually, it is about social and technical levers and dynamisms, or their tension points, which pave the way for unseen possibilities of appropriation and action, so as to ensure a common performance of tomorrow’s medical worlds. The main challenge is to find the perfect balance between an enhanced independence of patients and the doctors’ professional assistance: namely, through new management models for the relation expert/ profane.