3 ms·
only verified MDs or med students / professionals I wouldn't underestimate the expertise of regular people living with a disease. Parents of sick kids, especia
by hoelle 16y ago
only verified MDs or med students / professionals
I wouldn't underestimate the expertise of regular people living with a disease. Parents of sick kids, especially.
- klochner 16y agoThis is a good site for "regular people" suggestions: http://www.experienceproject.com/groups.php?c=health-wellness http://www.experienceproject.com/groups.php?c=health-wellnes...
- pmikal 16y agoMostly for people who already know what they have, not really diagnostic or symptom based. There is some interesting talks from one of the founders on Stanford's EC Corner: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?author=270 http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?author=2...
- Confusion 16y agoThey only have expertise on a specific (set of) disease(s) and are prone to identifying symptoms as problems that can be solved by the hammers they know so well. Professionals have received training in doing diagnoses and will consider a wider variety of options.
- Vivtek 16y agoAbstracting across a variety of people and thus a variety of hammers is the entire point of crowd sourcing. That's why you don't call it single-person sourcing.
- rwhitman 16y agoI made a comment on this a few threads above. Yahoo Answers is a prime example of laypeople making suggestions. Sure there are people with experience and solutions, but for the most part you get so much background noise with people who just speculate on unrealistic solutions or tell you to take XY obscure herb. The point here is that people frame medical problems on top of their own experience. And everyone's experience is different. You can have the same symptoms for countless different diseases. My thinking is that the only people who can see this objectively are medical professionals who have different folks coming into their office every day. Everyone else is biased by their own experience. Does this make sense?
- Vivtek 16y agoI've dealt with a lot of medical professionals. They're biased by their own experience as well, plus they're biased by the latest medical fads (don't think they don't exist), and they're biased by the ads they see in JAMA. They're not selected for being clear thinkers - they're selected for being good at rote memorization and kissing authority ass, Gregory House notwithstanding. Some doctors are fantastic. A lot are not - and a non-fantastic doctor plus a well-educated patient is a sure recipe for disaster, take it from me. Add an uncommon disease into the mix (and as our nephrologist says, there are categories of disease, like kidney disease, where every case is a new book) and the inescapable conclusion is that if you've got a chronic illness you are on your own. If you're lucky you'll find doctors that can give you good advice. But it's not likely to be the first guy down the road, either. Your larger point, that Yahoo Answers is filled with garbage, is very accurate. Most forums on any topic are filled with garbage, but health garbage has centuries of history and its promulgators are untiring. You learn to filter that crap out. What would be better - way better - is some combination of crowd sourcing and solid lay-medical journalism, investigating some of the extraordinary claims in search of extraordinary evidence (or usually lack thereof).
- rwhitman 16y agoI think you're right, the combination of layman knowledge and professionals might make the most sense. The big issue here is how to weed out bad advice