Just to riff in your point: while there are plenty of smart people on this site with a solid understanding of the underlying science, but at the end of the day everyone needs to find a trusted medical professional and take his or her advice that’s tailored for their specific circumstances.
This advice sounds good on the surface, but the staggering incompetence I continuously see in "medical professionals" has left me with the belief that someone who is smart and has enough time is probably better off researching things on their own in many cases.
There are many consumers who think they can make an intelligent decision when it comes to anything medical, not that many actually can. I'm personally willing to trust doctors and scientists more than random people reviews.
That's fine. I just feel like there's a dangerous overtrust of doctors among intelligent and educated people, and I hate to see comments that encourage that.
If you're scientifically illiterate and generally uneducated, trusting doctors is a very good idea. If you have the cognitive tools to check their work, though, it is very smart to do so.
To be fair, and I don’t say this in a spirit of criticism toward you, but taking medical advice from Internet strangers is not recommended generally.
Many (myself included) have relied upon Reddit in the past for niche advice or recommendations. My key is to only do so in applying topics I already understand enough to apply safely, so I know whether I’m reading a clever idea or someone talking out their ass.
In general we can't, because neither users nor moderators are in a position to judge bad medical advice.
There are genuine medical experts on HN, but they only pop up occasionally.
The majority of the replies from non-medical professionals here on this supposedly intelligent forum perfectly illustrates why that happens. People think they can tackle any problem and come to the correct conclusion with a minute of thinking alone, with no real knowledge or experience or testing. Now extrapolate that to the entire US or world and it is sadly not surprising that people think they know best and doctors and nurses and patients be damned.
In general I'd support that we have medical professionals to make these decisions for us. I would prefer to have someone I trust, is well educated on the subject, and keeps up with the literature who can point me in the right direction. One result of the specialization in our society and our inability to stay on top of every subject that affects our lives, is that no one can make a truly informed claim on every life decision.
Sadly, many health practitioners are less motivated by science and more motivated by process. They stop educating themselves after they have finished their residency equivalent. Once they are in charge of medical decisions they are bombarded with marketing, which has the goal of selling products, not necessarily with helping anyone.
At this point, I don't know who to trust for medical advice.
I think the commenters point was not about people reading articles on the internet and feeling that they've got a better understanding than doctors. It's about medical professionals thinking that they are infallible.
I was thinking the opposite point: sometimes the experienced doctor or researcher made a mistake, and the guy who posted something on Reddit is correct. Usually not, but sometimes.
Generally speaking, you should trust someone whose professional or experienced more than some random stranger. Especially if it's not one person but a large group of experienced professionals (most of the controversial "anti-science" issues today).
But it's actually important to "do your own research", and not just listen to authority. Provided you actually know how, i.e. you can find accurate sources and distinguish fact from fiction. Because even the most qualified, unbiased, genius authority are occasionally wrong. The big issue today is that a lot of people don't know how to research and distinguish lies, but (although it's probably impossible for most) finding a way to teach someone how to find the truth, will always be more effective having some authority tell them the truth.
Key example: doctors often miss symptoms and diagnoses that a patient can discover on their own. It's not that the doctor is stupid or unqualified, in fact they have way more medical knowledge than you. But the doctor only has a series of questions and maybe a few tests to make a diagnosis, whereas you have the full experience of symptoms and an internal understanding of your "normal". IMO people actually should "play Internet doctor" and research their symptoms, not to reach any 100% conclusions, but to suggest diagnoses and tests to their real doctor.
We're a fairly clever group here, with diverse knowledge. Which means I trust that people asking for advice here realize the need to balance anything posted here with asking a doctor.
Besides, doctors won't tell you anecdotes from other patients. They will present you with the options to treat your problems. Sometimes there are clear answers how to proceed. But when it is less clear, all they can do is tell you the options, and give you pros/cons, and maybe possible outcomes. You then need to make a decision. And asking other people who have been in the same place can be helpful to that decision-making process.
You gotta remember the average 'layperson' is just as smart as you. Do you need people worrying about what information you see or hear? It's like worrying people will be corrupted by South Park, gangster rap, etc., etc. There's plenty of crackpot doctors that make all sorts of claims- is it blasphemous to doubt that the Food Pyramid, and three meals a day, are the correct way to eat? People can handle their own shit.
That's just the way it goes with the internet, but you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater, you just need to weigh the advice you get accordingly.
I think the increasingly common practice of forbidding medical advice in online forums is deleterious. For a lot of people professional medical care provides no solutions, hearing other people's personal experiences is helpful and comforting.
To be fair, A) medicine is complicated, B) lots of people like to talk out of their asses about stuff they don't really know too much about.
I'm very leery of medical advice coming from a non-medical professional. Heck, I even double check medical advice coming from doctors since I've gotten conflicting diagnoses and been prescribed drugs to take for months only to find out from the manufacture website (not the doctor of pharmacists) that a follow up exam is required after five consecutive days of medication to prevent a potentially disabling side-effect.
This is why I enjoy articles such as this one. It's the closest thing to peer-reviewed advice I'm likely to get. Getting to read multiple physicians discuss this topic in detail provides me with a more complete understanding of the topic at hand.
If the person actually is an expert, yes. But actual experts, at least outside hard science domains where we can run controlled experiments to nail down theoretical models to the point where the actually do have high predictive accuracy, are much rarer than most people suppose.
For example, the author says he ignored his doctor's advice; but that only counts as ignoring the advice of an expert if his doctor actually was an expert. Most doctors aren't--in fact, one could argue that no doctors are, since nobody has a really good predictive model for medicine. Many doctors know more than at least a fair number of their patients do, but that's a much lower bar to clear than "actual expert". And given the current state of medicine and the availability of information online, it's pretty easy for a reasonably intelligent person to know more than any of their doctors do about their own particular condition--since they both are more interested in accurate information, and have more time to devote to finding it out.
Don't get me wrong Doc. Neither you nor I nor a random dude with a web-site has the capacity to make statements that might lead people to make medical decisions. Leave that to doctors and governments please.
It is good to be skeptical, but also important to trust the right people.
You should trust expert opinion, unless you are expert in given area. To understand medicine you need many years of hard study. Several articles from wikipeida is not enough.
Definitely agree with the HL suggestion and guest comment.
There is something to be said about personal experience and responsibility when consuming advice from a medical source, be it trusted or not. A medical doctor standing on the nations stage urging everyone to do the same thing (without any sort of responsibility to you, the one taking the advice) is hardly a prescription to leave your mind at the altar of “science”. My point here is that you should factor in your personal experience and local knowledge of the topic before imbibing in this type of nationwide directive.
What you have down is this: "so we're at a point in the Internet where random people feel confident enough to tell others to disregard professional medical advice in favor of their own "research""
Which is in response to a post saying that they disagree with another parent who says that none of these anecdotal experiences or advice given by other posters should be read.
Regardless, I think it's important for people to trust their own judgement, and weigh anecdotal experiences and advice from regular people, with the understanding that all advice comes from a certain context.
That being said, after the fact of having such a bad personal experience and afterwards seeing that actual academic literature shows such a big rift with what I was told by a licensed professional with many years of experience, I have to advocate, especially in the field of psychiatry, to make one's own best judgement, regardless of whether a doctor agrees or not, and only give them the authority of what they can logically provide as an argument for why you should follow a certain treatment.
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