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Please don't give medical advice on the internet, especially without specifying what the advice is for, or without knowing what condition the other person has.
by epgui 5y ago
Please don't give medical advice on the internet, especially without specifying what the advice is for, or without knowing what condition the other person has. It's obviously well intentioned, but incredibly reckless.
- QasimK 5y agoDo you really think someone is going to read that, start ignoring their doctors, throw all their medicine in the bin, and become some kind of natto evangelist? It’s a common Japanese food and he just said give it a go.
- epgui 5y agoYeah actually, that would be an unsurprising (but clearly bad) layperson's reading. If the last two years should have taught us anything, it's that even otherwise intelligent people will interpret perfectly reasonable, specific and precise health advice in the worst possible way.
- Broken_Hippo 5y agoDo you really think someone is going to read that, start ignoring their doctors, throw all their medicine in the bin, and become some kind of natto evangelist? Most folks don't become an evangelist! The rest, though - yeah, it happens. People get sold sham cures and diets all the time and dismiss proven treatments. Even when folks do not dismiss modern medicine and are doing things that aren't actively harmful, alternatives tend to delay proven treatments. Additionally, if you cannot afford medical treatment and you are presented with some "cure" that seems be a small fraction of the cost, it gets easier to justify whatever sham cure the person is trying to push. 'just try it out' comes with responsibility when you are talking medicine as it can snowball into something else.
- kritiko 5y agoI think what's funnier is that statins have become so cheap through generics, but they are demonized because of their purported side effects, so people are spending way more money for e.g. red rice yeast, which is just an unregulated statin.
- krageon 5y agoIt's not reckless to recommend someone try a food and see if it helps them feel better. Trying diverse foods is nice (as in, good for the variation in life) and in this case it may transcend the immediate niceness into a generalised well-being. Nobody here is recommending natto instead of whatever your doctor prescribes (which I guess you are implying) and you'd have to be severely mentally handicapped to assume this is what was written. In such a scenario you should not touch the internet unsupervised anyway, because all sorts of normal statements become potentially dangerous. In short: Real life shouldn't have to be a ball-pit surrounded by rubber tiles. We're all adults here.
- imtringued 5y agoIt's far more reckless to tell people to do something specific because they supposedly have a very specific disease because it is very easy to misdiagnose symptoms. There are so many symptoms that could either be something harmless (that can be fixed with a diverse non specific diet) or be cancer. If you spend too much time on medical websites trying to self diagnose you are at some point going to convince yourself that you have the worst disease of all the potential options.
- treeman79 5y agoYour point is valid. I would be dead if I hadn’t spent so much time researching. Doctors constantly dismiss symptoms as anxiety. At one point I was in ER (second time) gasping for air coughing up blood. Totally chill from all the anxiety meds while Doctor was explaining how it was just muscle strain. He went white when x/ray came back.