It seems many people are arguing "but that's not going to work, the airlines are already on so very thin profit margins".

Ticket prices are going to rise. A number of airlines are going to file for bankruptcy. Well bohoo. That's just the way it should be - market economy at work.

The article says:

Note that it doesn't say "loop" anywhere. So I gather they don't mean a central loop line like the moscow subway system. If you think of it more like a geographical grouping of the core stations in a ring shape, I'd say (squinting my eyes a bit) there's an embryo of it in Stockholm city between Slussen, Fridhemsplan and Östermalmstorg with T-centralen in the middle. Here's the map, btw...

Correct, that is pretty much how it works here too. So in practice it is for the most part an issue of availability anyway. I don't know yet how they specifically plan to go about in the cases where access actually could be expected to harm the patient (really only an issue in psychiatry settings, I imagine)

I am a doctor (although currently in a very junior position), and my employer, the local public health care provider, is planning on making patient records public in the very near future. (Link in Swedish, use google translate) For this reason, I have given this a bit of thought. From the larger perspective, I am all for empowering patients to access their records. The main argument against it, as I see it, is that there is a certain group of patients, maybe 1-2 %, where this hypothetically might become a problem. These are the patients who come from a position where they already have established a mistrust of healthcare providers, often (but not always) because of real or perceived mistreatments. There is a tendency among these patients to interpret everything said and done during their dealings with health care professionals in the worst possible way, reinforcing their distrust of health care in general. Having these people access their medical records, with all the latin, medical lingo and outright physician slang therein, could, I imagine, further fuel a feeling that something is going on behind their backs, which I believe is what is often at heart of the problem. On the other hand, you could also argue that it would have the opposite effect, reinstating a feeling of control in these patients when they realize that their doctor didn't write such horrible things in the journal about them as they might have imagined.

As for being a game changer, as some other people has suggested, I personally think this will have little impact on the whole. Really, as a doctor, believe me: we don't habitually hide things from our patients, as some people seem to believe! The kind of people who would use the info from their records to surf the web to find alternative treatments for their diseases etc., know all the meaningful facts even today from just discussing with their doctor. Knowing exactly how high their hemoglobin count was two months ago, and what exact differential diagnoses their doctor considered and decided to document last week, is hardly going to change that -- they would already have asked the right questions. Furthermore, the people who are overly respectful of white coats, have language issues and so forth, who could be considered most in need of information empowerment, is probably those who will make the least use of this service.

The headline is somewhat misleading, it should say: "Synthetic Skin Could Replace Animal Subjects IN COSMETICS TESTING, SPECIFICALLY DERMATOLOGICAL PRODUCTS". For medical applications we are very far from such a breakthrough, owing mostly to the immense complexity of large biological systems, such as a living animal or human being. For the vast majority of animal testing, this might at best result in a reduced need for small pieces of skin tissue for basic research in laboratory settings, which is hardly the problem anyway.