This is a weird stance. Anyone can say anything on the internet, they can be legal opinions or other things. It should not be necessary to disclaim such an opinion because no one should be using the internet as their basis of law (or medicine, etc) instead of a professional in the first place.
Yet we allowed someone without a medical license to say that with no consequence to the speaker. The AMA did not sue them, no one fined the. Because it is not illegal to give an opinion on something, even if it is a bad uninformed opinion.
For this subject, it's really just a matter of opinion more than anything.
I think if someone is commenting and has subject matter expertise, they should mention that ("I'm a doctor and happen to know that ..."), it's better than having everyone else adding disclaimers to their comments.
In an online comment no expertise is usually assumed, but yes this leads to stuff like a scientist with decades of experience publishing a study saying something that people don't want to hear, and then some troll on twitter says "No it's not" and people run with it because that's what they want to hear.
I think it's the Internet in general, it's not specific of HN.
You don't have to be trained and practicing in a field to know some things about it. Nobody should be making medical decisions solely on the advice of strangers on internet forums, but being a public defender doesn't automatically disqualify someone from being a credible source of sound medical information just like being a doctor doesn't automatically make a person credible.
After all, in my country we have a doctor telling people that their illnesses were caused by demon sperm and being on record saying that medical treatments come from alien DNA yet they're still allowed to keep their medical license and practice thanks to the Texas Medical Board.
It's possible that our public_defender is entirely wrong, but isn't better to attack the false claim than to attack a person or dismiss their opinions on the basis of their job title? Don't you suspect that you yourself have some useful information on things outside of your job description?
You are not a licenced medical practitioner. Telling people that kind of stuff face to face gets you into serious trouble, what makes you think it's okay to do so on-line?
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.
> Unless you have a list of all the posters, and their qualifications, you can not make that claim
No qualified psychiatrist or psychologist in their right mind would give medical advice to some anonymous person over the internet so this point is moot.
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.
Every person on there is a credentialed health professional as is Dr Bhattacharya I'm happy to have access to their opinions and for them to have the right to communicate.
Sorry if you feel like your, (assumed) lay opinion, supersedes theirs. Even if you are a health professional, you have no monopoly on the right to express opinions.
Wanting to silence other professionals in your field is a quack / scammer viewpoint in and of itself.
So, people who are tasked with determining truths like whether someone committed murder is okay, but it’s not okay to determine whether an online advertisement about a medical treatment is medically accurate?
The first rule of the internet is don't take medical advice from anonymous people on the internet. The second rule of the internet is don't take medical advice from anonymous people on the internet.
In general i think it's always better to have people express their opinions (may it be a wrong diagnosis) and be corrected. Especially on the internet, so people can learn.
No one is legally responsible for giving bad medical advice unless they are a licensed clinician. If I as a random person tell you to cure your headache by drilling a hole in your skull, and you're stupid enough do it, then that's on you. There is no need for additional laws in this area.
"I'm not a medical doctor, but here is a bunch of medical advice that should be used to prosecute this defendant." It doesn't sound that great either way. Either you have the expertise to make such judgments, or you don't, and shouldn't try to pass off legal opinions you can't legally make with a disclaimer, as if that absolves everything. I can fully understand someone getting irritated at this and trying to go one step further.
So you think, "Don't take medical advice from strangers on the Internet" (what I said) is equivalent to, "Don't obtain any second opinions or question you doctor" (what you seem to think I said)?
The internet with the latest and most information available to mankind can be ignored?
If someone gets information from video format they should be ignored?
If someone came in and wanted to have a conversation about a medical product they recently heard about they shouldn't go to their doctor with questions?
Sounds like someone is close to retirement or leaving the field with that attitude. Those are all valid concerns the general public may have. That's your job as a gp (to schedule appointments while patients tell you things you suggest your ideas).
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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