First, I would like to apologize on behalf of the Nuke Free Zone gang - and humanity in general - for James' post just now. Rest assured that he has since been found, sedated, placed back in restraints, and is currently not a danger to the general public.
And now, the news. From SFGate via, of all the godforsaken places, Slashdot, we have this:
Searching for health information is one of the most popular online activities, according to a July 2003 survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The survey found that 80 percent of adult Internet users spent time looking for health information, and a small minority, about 6 percent, surfed for health information every day."The Internet is a great resource, but it leads people in many directions, some of which are good and some of which are bad,'' said Dr. Brian Fallon, an associate professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and a leading researcher on hypochondria. "If you suffer from health fears, it becomes a nightmare. You type in a symptom and it comes up with many disease possibilities. You learn about more subtleties and horrors. You go into a chat room and throw out your symptoms and people say you have lupus."
Pharmaceutical advertising in the vaguest possible manner has become something of a national sport in the United States over the past several years, especially since it was discovered that advertisers didn't have to talk about things like side effects if they provided no other medical information. This leads to ads that consist of little more than "ask your doctor about Munchausomol" amidst cheery music, but that's not quite my main point tonight.
What I'm talking about right now is the gist of the SFGate article I came across this afternoon. I'm a creature of the nineties, and managed to begin skulking around the dark dungeons of the Internet somewhat before most people knew what it was. As a result, I'm fairly comfortable with the system; I know my way around it, how to behave in appropriate and/or safe and/or legal manners, and have come to generally see it not in terms of the medium itself, but in terms of the people using it. "The Internet" is almost never the problem, unless someone's DNS cacks it at a really inconvenient moment; rather, the twits managing the majority of it seem to be, so I generally don't dismiss Net related resources on their own account.
However, I'm entitled my hypocrisy; by the standards of the medium I am, after all, a Crusty Old Bugger, ancient and terrible by the standards of most, so here's my inconsistency. The one real exception my general acceptance of net.stuff is the notion of using the Net to find medical information.
Folks will generally notice that of me; I'll steadfastly and adamantly refuse to help people look up medical info online ("Don't research medical information online." "But -" "Don't research medical information online."), even if I wouldn't for other stuff. The main reason for that is that should be fairly obvious. Most of the time, the worst thing that can happen out of net based research is you do it wrong and come out looking like a moron but none the worse for wear otherwise. Things of a more medical bent can generally lead to a hell of a lot of stress, or worse.
The first and most obvious problem that the stuff could simply be flat-out Wrong is kind of obvious, and is a risk when it comes to looking at just about anything online. Another somewhat more insidious issue seems to come from the lawsuit fear that's permeated modern culture. Folks go way out of their way to make sure there's no possible room, not for misinterpretation, but misinterpretation which could lead to more serious risks. In the name of Playing It Safe, a lot of official or semiofficial sources of public health information online tend to have a very alarmist tone to them.
I've known quite a few people who have had something mundane like an allergic reaction to pollen, or the flu, and ended up freaking out even more after trying to figure out what they had without even bothering to ask a, oh, you know, physician. Now, there's nothing (much) actually wrong going on. However, a lot of the information out there tends to take the worst possible interpretation of the most mundane symptoms in the name of playing it safe. The end result is that I see people ending up Absolutely Convinced they've got late-stage cancer or the Black Death when there's nothing of consequence wrong. A lot of times this will simply end up stressing and panicking them out to the point where something does go wrong physically, which puts us a few steps behind square one on the whole thing.
Now, of course a lot of people aren't going to be too gullible when looking stuff up like that. However, millions of people are, and that's starting to become a real problem. When you couple the faulty and alarmist information available online with the generally faultier and even more alarmist information in the mainstream media (in Steve Jackson's words, "a difficult-to-spread disease which affects 0.5 percent of the population has become a terrifying plague"), it gets pretty fun.
I know there's a trend these days to distrust doctors. The abysmal state of the health care system in the US has led to the idea that the docs are misdiagnosing things on purpose so they can get kickbacks on prescription commissions, or other silliness. While I'm sure that does happen - it's impossible for it not to under that system - I don't buy it happening to the point where one should assume every doctor out there is a quack, and that self-diagnosis is the way to go. If it was really that easy, GPs wouldn't need to go to med school for most of a decade to hang out their shingle, although people who are already convinced that the Doctors' Conspiracy is real aren't exactly going to buy that. The backlash going on in the US has resulted in a similar distrust happening in Canada as well, albeit more towards psychologists and psychiatrists than general practitioners yet.
That doesn't mean it annoys the hell out of me any less. This sort of self-reinforcing paranoia is becoming a real problem these days, and I don't see any signs of it getting better, especially after the repeated "plague" scares that have come across North America in the past few years. Some of these people, like the SFG article notes, are hypochondriacs, it's true; folks who're wired towards that sort of thing. However, that's fairly treatable in time. A lot of people are simply being morons, abandoning common sense and then wondering what went wrong when they get in trouble for doing so.
Of course people should keep a close eye on themselves and take appropriate action when they think something's wrong. I'd like to think, however, that people don't necessarily need to look up medical information on a site that isn't even associated with a government or health-related agency before they can be sure that something's out of sorts with their own bodies. A little common sense and responsibility could save a lot of people a lot of ulcers both real and imagined, and it both pains and annoys me to see people finding that to be such a difficult notion.
Posted by zibblsnrt at February 15, 2004 11:04 PM