36 ms·

What would a “good” WebMD look like?

• lastofthemojito 4y ago
  I always figured it was due to liability. WebMD wants the monetizable traffic but not the liability of ya know, providing health care. So they profit off of the user's duress and just recommend they see a health care professional anyhow.
  • criddell 4y ago
    Of all the places Google could send people, WebMD isn't the worst. Amazon reviews, for example, have lots of terrible medical advice in them. Go to an apricot kernel page and look at the product reviews. I just did and the first review says: > I have cancer, have not treated it yet but I've started with these. Easy to use, clean fresh product A few reviews down: > THE BITTER THE BETTER! And they really are! People need to be more educated about the benefits of the BITTER apricot kernels! THEY MUST BE BITTER in order to kill and prevent the cancerous cells in your body! All you need is 2 kernels a day!
    • ciphol 4y ago
      That bitterness is cyanide, right?
• pfisherman 4y ago
  There is an excellent version of WebMD called UpToDate. The primary audience is physicians / clinicians, and they make money by selling subscriptions. So not a consumer health product, but an example of what the gold standard in this space looks like.
  • quickthrower2 4y ago
    Example link: https://www.uptodate.com/contents/approach-to-chronic-cough-in-children?search=cough&source=search_result&selectedTitle=2~150&usage_type=default&display_rank=2#H651262326 https://www.uptodate.com/contents/approach-to-chronic-cough-...
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• pixelpanic360 4y ago
• kwertyoowiyop 4y ago
  Sure this article is spammy self-promotion, but their prototype is exciting. I’d use it. It’s frustrating to go to a drugstore and see medicines for a cough, let’s say, each with a different active ingredient, and be unable to find concrete information comparing the effectiveness of each ingredient. And wow, the WebMD article they mentioned on essential oils was terrible. It really lowers my opinion of WebMD. At this point I get more helpful information about medicines from Reddit.
  • thomasfedb 4y ago
    Isn't that what the pharmacist is for? Pharmacies sell some dumb stuff, but if you actually ask for advice from the person with a license they'd like to keep, you should get some straight talk I'd think.
    • 1auralynn 4y ago
      I'd say over 50% of the time at my pharmacy, this would involve waiting in line for 20 min and talking to a harried, overworked pharmacist who may or may not be up on the latest research... not a great UX.
    • kwertyoowiyop 4y ago
      As an experiment, I will try that next time I’m buying an OTC remedy. It sounds like we share an opinion: Given that drugstores unironically place homeopathic nostrums and essential oils right next to actual medicines, I treat them as hostile environments out to scam unwary consumers rather than honest sources of information. But, as I said, I will give that a fair test.
      • chasd00 4y ago
        the pharmacist at a chain store has zero control of what's out there on the shelf. Just talk to them and see what they say. I suspect they'll give you an active ingredient suggestion first and then a handful of options of stuff they have on the shelf with that active ingredient.
  • 4y ago
• oneplane 4y ago
  If only there was a profession where knowledge, experience and continuous development are used to provide advice and care for individuals who may not have specialised in that same area of expertise. </s>
  • BurningFrog 4y ago
    I assume medical websites are somehow kept vague in order to steer us to pay these highly regulated professionals a fee for a visit.
    • bshep 4y ago
      I’d say its more likely that they are vague because of regulations and liability. IE you cant/shouldn’t give blanket medical advice and if you do you may be liable if someone has a bad outcome from the advice.
      • BurningFrog 4y ago
        That's my point! Regulations have been set up so you have to pay an AMA member to get any information that might be labeled "medical advice".
        • lotsofpulp 4y ago
          There is tons of medical advice. Wikipedia, cdc, health.gov, mayoclinic, webmd, Reddit forums, hacker news, etc. You can even get fake diagnosis and fake healthcare from chiropractors who are allowed to advertise themselves as doctors, and fake medicine from naturopaths or whatever who are also allowed to call themselves doctor. I am using fake to mean unsupported by evidence in the form of sufficiently blind trials and whatever else is needed to qualify as scientifically sound (not the same as FDA approved).
          • BurningFrog 4y ago
            That chiropractors have good lobbyists that managed to carve out a lucrative regulatory niche doesn't really disprove my theory.
• savanaly 4y ago
  Extremely relevant Slate Star Codex/Astral Codex Ten piece: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-of-legible https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-...
  • NavinF 4y ago
    Wow that article does a much better job explaining the problem than the submission does.
• JackFr 4y ago
  Plot twist (spoiler alert?) - in the last section the author reveals he's got prototype WebMD replacement!
• jonatron 4y ago
  To take the example of Aspirin and Essential Oils, NHS has no ads and has information on Aspirin https://www.nhs.uk/medicines/aspirin-for-pain-relief/ https://www.nhs.uk/medicines/aspirin-for-pain-relief/ , but doesn't have information on Essential Oils. It probably doesn't list supporting evidence because most people don't want to read it and wouldn't understand it.
• VancouverMan 4y ago
  I wish I could have had a 35% to 40% satisfaction rate with the various actual medical professionals I've dealt with in-person over the years. I'd say that fewer than one in five such encounters has left me feeling like I got good advice, and a favourable outcome. Even just a 25% satisfaction rate would be a notable improvement for me.
• debacle 4y ago
  Compare WebMD to examine.com The difference? You pay for examine.com. The outcome? The highest quality site for information on supplements, vitamins, etc available on the Internet. WebMD just needs to be good enough for Google.
  • jandrese 4y ago
    > The outcome? The highest quality site for information on supplements, vitamins, etc available on the Internet. This just sounds like snake oil advertising but with the privilege of paying to see it.
    • Workaccount2 4y ago
      There are in fact a lot of supplements that are effective. Magnesium for heart issues, Calcium for bone density, creatine for weight lifting. There are also a lot of supplements that do nothing. The "snake oil". Examine exists so that you can use studies to determine which is which.
      • daniel-cussen 4y ago
        Snake oil per se is an analogue of fish oil, effective. It's use as a pejorative term dates to false advertising of petroleum as actual snake oil in the 19th century. The biggest problem was it wasn't well processed at the time, and was not really edible like petroleum derivatives can now be made to be. And I generally don't take it at face value, I accept it as a glitch in English.
  • Semaphor 4y ago
    > The difference? You pay for examine.com. Shouldn’t it be "You can pay"? Because I get all the information I need on Examine for free (and checking their paid offering, they seem to have changed from "professionals" to "laypeople" as their target audience, with everything being a guide and behind a clearer interface).
• jjar 4y ago
  A better question might be: Why is the private sector responsible for providing accurate health information? As this article shows, the incentives for people running medical websites and the people reading them are not aligned. I'd say the UK NHS website and symptoms/medications pages hit the nail on the head - https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/ https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/. It has no advertising and provides short, easily readable and actionable information on the majority of conditions and the correct way to use and take many different sorts of medication. And crucially - if the information present is not sufficient, clear and obvious UI elements that direct the next best steps to get the help you need, whether that be ringing the non emergency helpline or immediately going to A&E. (It's been commented on before, but the new UK government sites are very consistently structured and open source their design systems https://service-manual.nhs.uk/design-system https://service-manual.nhs.uk/design-system)
  • ravenstine 4y ago
    That's a nice page, and I'll definitely bookmark that one. But I don't see most of the public using something like that over WebMD. WebMD is complete trash (I even block it in my Kagi search preferences), but it succeeds over sites like the NHS one because of blog SEO. WebMD is really a glorified blog with posts about every condition you might get paranoid over. I don't know how precisely they achieve this, but they're doing something right in an SEO sense if The Google continues to put them near the top of results after all these years. Meanwhile, there are also sites like Merck Manuals, which is both a terrific resource and privately run, but I don't recall ever seeing it coming up for a search query like "what is that bump on the side of my neck." https://www.merckmanuals.com/ https://www.merckmanuals.com/ The resources are out there. Whether The Google thinks the average person should read them is a different story. I don't believe The Google is going to ever filter out WebMD, so there must be a middle ground where sites like the ones you and I mentioned find a way to make themselves more WebMD-like without sacrificing their more academically-minded content they already have.
    • tmoravec 4y ago
      So there's a private option that's terrible (WebMD) and a private option that's terrific (Merck Manuals). And it's the terrible one that ranks well at Google. Sounds like a Google problem and apparently only a Google problem.
• candlemas 4y ago
  Most medical research is junk science that doesn't replicate so any site relying on those studies is probably going to be useless anyway. That could be why the satisfaction is so low.
• stevage 4y ago
  The phenomenon they describe for health information is, IMHO, absolutely rife across many different domains. Try looking up information about gardening, plant management, home improvement, etc - you'll find the same thing. Search results dominated by sites that have mastered the art of producing SEO-optimised "content" that is not authoritative, full of waffle, and not especially helpful. For whatever reason, the business model of "draw a huge amount of traffic" outcompetes the business model of "provide a really good source of information". It's interesting to ponder why in very specific domains, that's not the case: for instance, StackOverflow dominates in programming queries, and provides very useful content. Someone much smarter than me should write a really good blog post about this.
  • SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
    I looked up a “how to change guide spark plugs” for a vehicle. First hit was SEO garbage that started off “Before we explain the steps, let’s first examine what the proper stoichiometric ratio is!” … I closed that site while grinding my teeth. The internet kinda sucks now.
  • tern 4y ago
    A partial salve would be a search engine that only returns results from websites where the people writing cannot make money from their content. It's quite interesting to ponder the implications of this.
    • myself248 4y ago
      When you put it that way, it's so glaringly obvious that Doubleclick (wearing their Google skin; keeping the name when they merged was the smartest thing the devil ever did) is the precise and irreconcilable opposite.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    Because StackOverflow successfully (for some value of success) transitioned the forum model to the modern web. We had these "really good sources of information" - we had forums dedicated to almost any topic you could want to know about, and people educated in the area would frequent them. They've almost all died out - some remain as a mostly static reference (which is incredibly useful!), others continue to plod along. A few subreddits pop up now and then, but it's not really the same thing (subreddits are even more prone to "flooding" from outside "contributors" who end up turning it into a meme-reddit). If a company is tangentially related to a topic, you can do worse than dedicating a few full-time employees to a forum on that topic. We're posting on one right now!
• cratermoon 4y ago
  As other comments hint but don't directly say: the incentives for WebMD are the same as any other website: revenue through ad sales. WebMD is owned by Internet Brands, which is owned by private equity, so of course it's not just revenue, but profit. Any website needs a source of money, just to pay to keep the lights on, much less develop and maintain the content. As long as ad-driven revenue is the incentive, the result will always be perversely steered towards attention-getting content.
• MR4D 4y ago
  I work in Finance in the US, and I think our industry has a good model to build on. The SEC requires a decent amount of information for all sorts of investments and financial entities to publish at various times - everything from IPOs to management changes. I'm not sure if the FDA/CDC/NIH/etc has anything like this, but they should probably start requiring it and/or providing it. I think this would go a long way to solving this problem.
• resoluteteeth 4y ago
  WebMD is "awful" because a list of every medical condition with every possible treatment and every possible symptom is totally useless to normal people. When people visit WebMD what they really want is actual, personal medical advice. The solution isn't throwing technology at it to do "automated evidence synthesis," it's making it easier and more affordable for people to talk to get a consultation with an actual medical professional.
• FounderBurr 4y ago
  A much better WebMD would like like Wikipedia. Hint: it’s Wikipedia.
  • Workaccount2 4y ago
    It's annoying that google has been forcefully pushing down wikipedia at least for medically related things. I don't want to have to go to the second page to get an article that isn't scared to use a word longer than 6 letters.
    • davidrupp 4y ago
      If I want information on medically related things, Wikipedia is my go-to. I skip Google (actually, DuckDuckGo) altogether and just start my search on the Wikipedia home page.
  • ciphol 4y ago
    I would say that WebMD is better than Wikipedia. Anyone can edit Wikipedia, and in practice this means content often comes from idiosyncratic people with axes to grind. Wikipedia pages vary immensely in correctness, completeness, objectivity, clarity, and usefulness. WebMD, in contrast, is pretty consistent in all those ways; its flaws (wordiness, lack of reference to detailed research, catering to the customer) are of minor consequence to the typical person searching for medical information (we at HN are not the typical person). The best Wikipedia articles are better than the best WebMD ones, but the worst Wikipedia articles are worse, and in medicine it's the floor you care more about.
• boringg 4y ago
  WebMD is for the general public (GP) and useless on anything you need in depth - helpful for broad inquiry. UpToDate which practitioners use is amazing but too much information for the general public. It's part of what I mentioned in another comment which is that the internet is to general and vague in its information (and generally low-mid quality) while private information is, sometimes, of higher quality. It leads people who want to learn more about things in a bind where they are limited by the accessibility to good quality information. Also you don't want the GP to have access to uptodate because they would self diagnose in so many of the wrong ways and wouldn't understand everything.
  • skybrian 4y ago
    Looks like UpToDate is $60 a month, or you can subscribe for a week for $20.
    • thomasfedb 4y ago
      They have patient/caregiver subscriptions. I'm not sure if it's the same set of articles that doctors get access to. The ones I use are definitely not written for the layperson, though they do have a whole series of articles written for laypersons "The Basics" and "More Than The Basics" which are designed to be handed out by doctors.
      • skybrian 4y ago
        Those prices are for the patient subscription. $20 for temporary access doesn’t seem too bad for medical information if you need it, but most people aren’t going to pay it without trying it out first. Particularly when free info is available. https://store.uptodate.com/ccrz__ProductDetails?viewState=DetailView&cartID=&sku=PTNTS-Kit&grid=a2x0L000007PLZ8QAO https://store.uptodate.com/ccrz__ProductDetails?viewState=De...
  • captainbland 4y ago
    GP is quite a confusing initialism to use here as GP often means "general practitioner", which is like a family doctor/primary care physician in much of the anglosphere outside of the US.
• mananaysiempre 4y ago
  > Why can't I see the percent of people who experience a particular side effect? Is that a US thing? Because I’m looking at the small-print paper thingie that came (has to come) with a moderately dramatic prescription drug, and it has: “Side effects: very frequent ( ≥ 10%): ... frequent ( ≥ 1% and < 10%): ... infrequent ( ≥ 0.1% and < 1%): ... rare ( ≥ 0.01% and < 0.1%): ... very rare ( < 0.01%): ... The following side effects were observed after this drug was released to market. The incidence rate is considered to be unknown, as it cannot be estimated from the available data. ...” (This seems especially weird because I expect most of the data to have come from FDA submissions.)
  • pwinnski 4y ago
    This information is absolutely available, just not on WebMD!
  • Vecr 4y ago
    Look up "[drug] FDA prescribing guide", you should be able to find it, though search engines recently appear to have gotten a bit worse at it.
• psim1 4y ago
  Unpopular opinion(?): online medical information should be inaccessible to the common person. It should be journal papers full of jargon, behind paywalls, and otherwise restricted. Laymen can't handle medical information. They use it to self-diagnose, or worse, diagnose others. They use it to question doctors because the doctor's advice doesn't match their Google-fu. Ridiculous sites like WebMD make it worse. WebMD will tell you that you have cancer no matter what you search. I sympathize with those in the health care system who are too busy, and those who are waiting for care. But giving the public a bunch of misinformation with which to shoot their feet seems like the wrong approach. (Anecdotal: I live with a Google warrior who distrusts all doctors because they think their understanding of medicine is superior.)
  • thomasfedb 4y ago
    As a doctor I have a brief moment of sympathy with this idea - I've seen far too many patients badly mislead by "Dr Google" - but ultimately I think it is important to provide clear, helpful, and well-targeted health information online for the layperson. Of course there's no incentive for WebMD to do this, they just want clicks on ads. But in Australia our governments publish a fair bit of helpful health information online, and I do often print some of it out for my patients when they go home. Sometimes it's not enough in itself, but it's great for a "you've got X, here's some info about it" situation. UpToDate is the medical-grade, actually helpful, for professionals only, quite expensive "Wikipedia for Medicine", I use it every day, among a few other resources. But it's not something you can just open up and use - it's very much designed to be used by people with the right background knowledge - you need to know how to find what you want, and you need to know how to use what you find.
  • AshamedCaptain 4y ago
    Just watch what happens on every HN article which is about anything possibly medical. One day you have one conclusion, the next day you have the completely opposite conclusion, and the only thing that's common is that the comment section of _both articles_ is filled with people who will readily claim "this worked for me".
• gnz11 4y ago
  Goes without saying, but "Don't google your symptoms." has been an unwritten law of the Internet since Google first became the dominant search engine. WebMD and its knockoffs have been hot garbage for quite some time now.
  • Cd00d 4y ago
    There's a standup bit, I don't remember who the comic is, where he says, "my elbow was kinda sore after I was playing a bunch of tennis. I looked it up on the internet and oh no! It turns out I have elbow cancer!"
    • snickerbockers 4y ago
      im not sure i see the punchline? theres a group of connective tissue cancers called sarcomas that are often found near knees and elbows.
      • Cd00d 4y ago
        The joke is that anything medical you search for online you'll end up having your greatest fears validated, rather than get helpful and balanced insight. Or rather, all online diagnoses are cancer.
  • chasd00 4y ago
    yeah they all pander to hypochondriacs and people who suffer from anxiety. Oh and they all absolutely prey on new parents. Never ever resort to the internet as a new parent, just call your pediatrician. As a father of two, i can't stress the previous sentence enough.
• csours 4y ago
  Why do scientific studies have such poor user experience? Partly because they're written to pass peer review, not to inform practitioners or the public. I want to know one main thing before I read your study - Why should I believe your study? That is: what is the sample size, did you pre-register methods, who funded the study, what type of study is it, etc. Studies are written for paper publications, but that hasn't been the main distribution method for years.
  • AshamedCaptain 4y ago
    > Why do scientific studies have such poor user experience? > Partly because they're written to pass peer review, not to inform practitioners or the public. Neither you nor the public nor practicioners should be reading "scientific studies". Please remember that the actual value of any one scientific study is practically _zero_. They are only useful to big companies and/or national scientific bodies which actually may have the resources to even try to reproduce them.
    • robbiep 4y ago
      This is a very pertinent point, and i speak from experience when I say that if less laymen (and women) tried to read scientific papers on their conditions, real or imagined, the job of a doctor would be easier
• jefftk 4y ago
  Doctors generally use a service like UpToDate, which I understand is pretty good. Issues with providing the same quality of service to consumers include: * Doctors are willing to pay a lot (ex: UpToDate is ~$500/y) and you might not be able to keep such high fees for doctors if you also offered a great consumer-focused option. * Consumers have a wide range of experience levels, where it's going to be hard to make a page that satisfies both people who know very little and have minimal medical background and others who are looking seriously into their condition. * Liability is very different when you're writing directly for consumers.
  • robbiep 4y ago
    It’s a different service because it’s generally quite technical, and also it has a fairly large editorial team constantly reviewing and updating the content. The ‘simple English’ UpToDate is Wikipedia or the NHS website
• _ea1k 4y ago
  Two words: Revenue optimization Everything free on the web is optimized to maximize the delivery of advertisements and referrals at the expense of everything else. And Google no longer rewards credible sources vs ad-laden garbage.
• abrax3141 4y ago
  Better WebMd already exists. https://www.cochrane.org/ https://www.cochrane.org/
• cm2012 4y ago
  How does the article and comment section not have one mention of liability? No one gives clear medical descriptions without 10 miles of caveats that water the information down completely. This is because no one wants to be sued for bad medical advice.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• isaacfrond 4y ago
  What are they talking about. I'm perfectly happy with WebMD. Well written and accessible articles. Often the first hit in a google search, and rightly so. Could the OP possibly be projecting a bit here?
• jmyeet 4y ago
  I'd go further than this and ask why pretty much everything is awful. This issue comes up a lot when people talk about Google "stealing" content or favoring their own properties. I think there's some merit to this argument and it's worth monitoring but the other side is that Google ends up embedding things in search results because the sites for those things are both trivial and awful. Example: go Google "mortgage calculator". You will get exactly what you want embedded at the top. Put in the principal, loan length and interest rate and it'll tell you waht the payment is. Now go click on any of the links on the first page. You will get hammered by ads. You will get pages that split their calculators over multiple pages to get more ad impressions. The whole experience is just plain awful. So it's no surprise to me that Google just embedded their own for what is really a trivial function. As a user I much prefer that and would hate to see any government action forbid such a thing. So, WebMD. WebMD is an example of all the bad incentives that make those mortgage calculators terrible. It's all about maximizing ad impressions. Now I absolutely hate Google AMP but I also understand the motivation for it (even if I vehemently disagree with the solution). So many sites are just plain awful and slow. Exceptions to the "slow and awful" principle are rare but exist. Stack Overflow is a prime example.
• readthenotes1 4y ago
  Stopped paying attention at "a 47% increase in all published health knowledge." Not hardly. Maybe a X% decrease (if Science is advancing), but the amount of garbage, not knowledge, is overwhelming. (Maybe biased memory, but I think every PubMed article that has come up here has been ripped to shreds)
• firasd 4y ago
  An interesting example: a few months ago I dropped something on my toenail and it turned black. Wading through WebMD etc (which is where google was sending me) was not helpful, especially in between the popups and autoplay videos I finally restricted my search to wikipedia and quickly found out that it's called 'subungual hematoma' and "usually self-resolving", which is what I needed to know. Recently I tried this query on GPT-3 and it worked well too: Prompt: Something fell on my nail and it turned black GPT: Possible causes for a black nail include: trauma to the nail, a melanoma, or a subungual hematoma (a collection of blood under the nail). If the black nail is accompanied by pain, swelling, or redness, seek medical attention. If the black nail is not painful and has no other symptoms, it is likely a subungual hematoma and will eventually grow out with the nail.
  • InCityDreams 4y ago
    >especially in between the popups and autoplay videos I hop ur toes get gooder.
• aabajian 4y ago
  I'm an interventional radiology resident near the end of my training. I think Google needs to index the clinician-facing side of UpToDate. It can't right now because it's paywalled. For those unfamiliar with UpToDate, it is considered the #1 online reference for evidence-based medicine. What they do is write articles that summarize research articles from each domain. They have much more content than this, but it's the expert-summaries that make it a "killer app" for clinicians. We simply don't have time to read all the latest research. Also, UpToDate is the #1 most expensive subscription that most academic universities pay for (e.g. in terms of journal subscriptions).
• ahwvd37js 4y ago
  I gave up on WebMD and its ilk years ago. You get better information by just searching for med literature on google scholar, and you can read anything with sci-hub. Or ask a doctor friend to download a subject page from UpToDate.
• m3kw9 4y ago
  One that doesn’t say cancer in the same list as other possibilities every time you try to find out why there is a small issue. It’s a UX/UI issue they can solve
• peter_retief 4y ago
  The health sector will probably be the last to get disrupted mainly because it is tightly controlled and regulated. Regulation probably isn't a bad thing in itself but if it isn't used to enforce the status quo, keep control and set prices. I have this idea that health data should be open sourced, I have no problems with my continuous blood pressure, sugar levels and pulse rate (etc) being used in machine learning to identify clusters that might be useful. Just a thought for now.
• mrpf1ster 4y ago
  I see a lot of people talking about WebMD but not much about the prototype the author made to fix it: https://www.glaciermd.com/ https://www.glaciermd.com/ I really love the website, it’s simple, fast, and very useable from a mobile context!
• victorclf 4y ago
  Medscape is what WebMD should be. It targets health professionals but it's a great resource for independent learners. There are great summaries for every disease and treatment written by doctors and researchers. Summary includes epidemiology, symptoms, causes, prognosis, possible treatments, novel treatments, differential diagnoses, etc. Given that there are bad professionals in every area, it's a great resource to evaluate if your doctor's diagnosis and suggestions make sense. Unlike your local doctors, good online resources don't have financial incentive to recommend unnecessary drugs or surgeries where the risks outweigh the benefits.
  • Javantea_ 4y ago
    Medscape is owned by WebMD fyi.
• giantg2 4y ago
  I don't see what the big problem is. WebMD, drugs.com, etc are generally fine for me when I want some quick basic info. Some of the stuff they're complaining about WebMD not having, like percentage of different side effects, are available on other sites like drugs.com. If I want in-depth info, I'll visit PubMed. Sites like NIH, CDC, and FDA can be helpful, but generally not any better than WebMD in regards to format, content, searchability, or precompiled rankings/lists.
• jfdi 4y ago
  Keep it up! Love where you are heading with this!
• rorykirchner 4y ago
  Uptodate.
  • jvmx 4y ago
    This is 100% the correct answer - it’s literally what actual doctors use, even while you’re sitting in their office with them as they diagnose you. It’s subscription only though.
• fudgefactorfive 4y ago
  I worked for a company that tried to do exactly what this article is proposing, I was responsible for parsing the data from publications into exactly this sort of table. The primary reason is that it is very hard to come up with a schema that even 5% of papers would adhere to. The vast majority of this knowledge is phrased as natural language. There are databases that track compounds and the publications related to them, but those papers again are natural language and cannot be readily converted to tabular data. Our first basic approach involved POS tagging and then trying to associate proper nouns with numeric values. Again the issue became how do you interpret a sentence like "may lead to sudden death" as a symptom? Something like "may lead to symptom X in Y% of respondents" is a nightmare to consistently parse without heavy ML running over huge datasets of just text. In the end we wound up having to shut down concluding that until papers are released with not only arbitrary XML tables/results we were not equipped to handle the task. And even worse, what if our models didn't interpret things correctly and a consumer got {symptom:"sudden death", chance:0%} and insisted on that compound for their indication only to later realize the paper stated "in lab setting 0% of animals didn't experience sudden death after being administered X after diabetes diagnosis". Paying a hundred students to work around the clock couldn't get the volume processed accurately for months, let alone getting a second army of validators to confirm each entry.
  • fudgefactorfive 4y ago
    In the end the only functional parts that worked algorithmicly are exactly those featured in the GlacierMD demo. What trials are running related to this indication, what compounds are being tested for the indication and what other indications are related. That's the easy part, it's effectively a word association game, TF-IDF did this job admirably, scoring proper nouns by their uniqueness and then associating them with one another and searching for publications with similar words as the requested indication. Effectively a medical word cloud for each indication and compound. Parsing them into symptoms is the first nightmare, the second is numeric values associated with those symptoms and paper results. There is a very good reason the demo only has one indication and a handful of symptoms, it's being done manually and then at best showing publications related to the words encountered. It's not a matter of cost, although the author is all but doomed if they want to cover more than a few indications, it's a matter of not forcing publicly funded health publications to use an electronically parseable Format despite the simplicity of them being able to parse their paper by definition. See the standards XKCD, the issue is getting many different academics and departments to agree on a set of schema to include alongside their publications. PubMed at least tries with their XML dumps but even those are inconsistent at best and non-syntactically interpretable at worst. The Japanese compound tracker is great to learn about a specific compound and their indications but stops there.
• ahstilde 4y ago
  Disclaimer, I am the founder of Wyndly (YCW21) -- we fix allergies for life through telehealth and personalized immunotherapy. WebMD, Healthline, and Verywell Health all monetize off of views. They're exceptional SEO operators, and they know how to game Google. The trick is to find people who aren't monetizing off of just views. Actually helpful information is coming from services that don't monetize off of views, or where the content is written for more than just SEO. For example, Anja Health is educating people about a novel idea (https://www.tiktok.com/@kathrynanja https://www.tiktok.com/@kathrynanja). At Wyndly, we build trust with our content by having my co-founder answer common questions (https://www.instagram.com/wyndlyhealth/ https://www.instagram.com/wyndlyhealth/). These are experts sharing their niche. In fact, we source the questions we answer from our support inbox. So, not only are we putting useful information our into the world, we're creating resources for our support team. It's a win-win. Side note: yes, we do play the SEO game somewhat. At the end of the day, if we have a successful video, it'd be foolish not to resource it for Google and for people: https://www.wyndly.com/blogs/learn/what-kind-of-doctor-for-allergy-testing https://www.wyndly.com/blogs/learn/what-kind-of-doctor-for-a...
• warrenm 4y ago
  >So to summarize: a good version of WebMD would have > - structured, quantitative information > - real-time updates > - summaries of supporting evidence >So why hasn't anyone done this yet? >The short answer: cost. Money It's always money
• xivzgrev 4y ago
  I don't have to imagine - Healthline. it's clearly an SEO game that's cropped up recently, but it's executed in a sustainable way. The articles I stumble on are actually helpful. For example, there was a recent HN article on research supporting the practice of grounding. So I googled it, and found a Healthline article: https://www.healthline.com/health/grounding#benefits https://www.healthline.com/health/grounding#benefits It clearly explained what it was, why it may have benefits, what a few experts say, risks, etc. There are ads but barely (for now) - on a recent article on mobile, it's one small banner, and then one in-line ad that doesn't even look like one. It's not a barely-readable dumpster fire like WedMD. Of course, all roads lead to Rome, so at some point Healthline may look like a dumpster fire as well, so enjoy it while we can!
• mtts 4y ago
  This problem is pretty solved in the Netherlands. https://www.thuisarts.nl https://www.thuisarts.nl is set up by the Dutch federation of General Practitioners and provides good, non-sensationalist information that is guaranteed to be vetted by the likes of the very doctor you'd normally visit (or by the people who train them, I presume - pretty sure if you look up a GP handbook you'll find almost the same text as on that site, only with more detail and with more complicated language).
• mindprism 4y ago
  Basically just a big banner page that reads "Yep, you probably have cancer."
  • kurupt213 4y ago
    And AIDS
• chasd00 4y ago
  the best site would be a single page that says "talk to your doctor" vertically and horizontally aligned in a large font. If you want to read about how not using a certain brand of band-aids means your child is destined to become a serial killer then research medical information online. For medical information the Internet is the last place i go.
  • wyre 4y ago
    Not when a large percentage of Americans can’t afford a visit to their doctor, that disclaimer is only going to be ignored and users will look elsewhere.
    • daniel-cussen 4y ago
      Yeah there's a highly restrictive quota, your affording medicine comes at other Americans's expense. Cornered market. Now if you were to travel to South America or in particular to Cuba that would not restrict health care access to other Americans. On the contrary. They basically all speak English in Chile, accent yeah just deal with it, better than a 50-minute wait for a 6-minute appointment meant to last 20 minutes.
  • deleted 4y ago
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• kurupt213 4y ago
  If I need information I look for the publications linked from the NIH website. I think the problems with health information are that the vast majority of the population isn’t sophisticated enough to understand the physiological and biochemical specifics, and that generic info is pretty much worthless. People should listen to their doctors (who specifically advise against running to google for every symptom)
  • standardUser 4y ago
    Doctors can be wrong (they have been for me multiple times) and I feel a certain sense of responsibility for learning about and understanding what is going on in my body. Now, if I had a panel of doctors at the ready to answer my questions and explain things to me in the detail I want, that would be great. But that seems unrealistic. So we do need something to bridge the gap between the fallible doctor we very occasionally get to talk to and our otherwise deep ignorance of our own health and bodies.
  • ExciteByte 4y ago
    If by "listen" you mean by "blindly listen" (by the context of your comment it seems you mean blindly listen), this is absolutely horrible advice, and I wish people would stop repeating it. Even for most slightly non-trivial problems, physicians are often wrong in either diagnosis or treatment plans. In fact I've found physicians be some of the worst debuggers/problem solvers that I've ever encountered.
• hedora 4y ago
  Back when I was a kid, my mom had a 1,000 page book that is more or less what this article is asking for. I wonder what ever happened to that book. (Are there newer editions, for example?)
  • 082349872349872 4y ago
    Sounds like the Merck Manual. (see other comments for links)
• nicwolff 4y ago
  Like https://www.thennt.com https://www.thennt.com which friends of mine started and tried to monetize – but there's no obvious revenue source for unbiased evidence-based diagnosis and treatment recommendations. Or none that's obvious to investors.
• Gadiguibou 4y ago
  In the U.S., MedlinePlus [0] seems to be the best repository for vetted medical information. It's government-backed and links to the relevant organizations where appropriate. [0]: https://medlineplus.gov https://medlineplus.gov
• intothemild 4y ago
  I have a story for all of you on this topic, strap yourselves in. We had the solve for this issue, and we had it back in 2013. I remember interviewing for a brand new startup as the first employee, the idea was that you had an app/website and got the doctor to add what they told you into this app. I remember sitting there and saying during the interview, something like "That adds stress onto the doctors who are already stressed, you should be giving relief to them, perhaps what we need is something better than google/WebMD so people might not need to come in IF they find their anwser". So that was what we decided to do, to make a App/Website to give anwsers better than Google/WebMD, verified by doctors on our board. We called it Your.MD. It was a symptom checker, it took search queries like google, and ran NLP against that, then asked follow up questions based off the query... It worked really really well. Then our Chairman punched our first CEO, the CEO left, and we got a second CEO in, he got a couple board seats, and the writing was on the wall. He brought in some guy from Talking Tom... remember that talking cat app? The new CEO and this guy decided to change the working symptom checker and turn it into a chatbot.... we protested about as much as we could as founding members.. but it fell on deaf ears.. We were forced to destroy something that worked perfectly for the abomination that became what Your.MD was... The CEO fired us all... well he tried, but labor laws are amazing here in Norway, so I got a nice exit. The CEO installed himself as the "Founder" on everything including the Wikipedia page.. I think the company has some new name now.. dunno don't care. But yeah.. We had the solve for this, the problem was always that people google things, and google isn't great (read terrible) at this problem, and WebMD suuuucks because .. well this article says it better than I could.
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    [deleted]
• Kalanos 4y ago
  graph database backend for textmining/associations
• afryer 4y ago
  tangential resources for nutritional/dietary supplements: Consumer focus: https://examine.com/ https://examine.com/ Professional focus: https://naturalmedicines.therapeuticresearch.com/ https://naturalmedicines.therapeuticresearch.com/ Both sites maintain nice monographs that curate evidence and provide easy to interpret effectiveness scores. Natural Medicines database goes even further and maintains a database for commercial products. I find both incredibly useful for evaluating ingredients and their structure/function effects
• throwaway12372 4y ago
  not owned by big pharma
• aantix 4y ago
  Five year survival rates listed for local surgeons across the procedures they perform. Sortable by number of procedures performed, death rates on the table, survival rates. I don't care how "kind" the physician is, if they listened to my concerns. I want to know their effectiveness.
  • FalcorTheDog 4y ago
    How useful would that information be? Seems like a good way to "punish" surgeons that take more difficult cases.
  • aaaddaaaaa1112 4y ago
  • InCityDreams 4y ago
    Maybe the patients were crap.
• paperpunk 4y ago
  I've been involved in an attempt to do this at a smaller scale, for a specific discipline: https://maxfacts.uk/ https://maxfacts.uk/ – which aims to be a complete resource for patients and professionals in the oral and maxillofacial field. Like WebMD, but up-to-date, properly researched, and very thorough. The linked article here talks about having structured, quantitive information, but I think this might be an engineer's view on medicine. The reality on the ground is much messier. We tried to give people enough information on medical practice, explanations on the biological/chemical mechanisms, and other resources to make their own informed choices about their treatment and care. For example, trying to explain the mechanics of taste, and texture for eating food so that people can understand what kind of adaptations they can make to improve their quality of life. I think we probably fall short of that goal sometimes because our material is overly technical or scientific but it's a work-in-progress.
• 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
  So to summarize: a good version of WebMD would have: * structured, quantitative information * real-time updates * summaries of supporting evidence So why hasn't anyone done this yet? They have: https://www.clinicalkey.com/ https://www.clinicalkey.com/ However, it's for professionals, and it's not free. Only a professional has the knowledge, experience and context to use the information properly. For patients there are separate products/resources that clinicians can use to give patients more information about their case. But the patient can't just diagnose themselves. And certainly the effort of curating the dataset and developing the toolkit to power it isn't free.
• faangiq 4y ago
  A massive improvement would be listing probabilities of various symptoms. Typically you go to WebMD/similar, look something up, and it includes every possible symptom. This creates low signal to noise and makes it difficult to diagnose and understand risks.
• mikenew 4y ago
  Examine.com is the closest analogue to what this site is trying to do, and as far as I know, it works. It takes a while, but if people develop trust in a product or website they value that deeply, and are even willing to throw money at it. I don't even consider trying to google a supplement; I'll just go to examine and look at the body of evidence, recommended dosages, etc. I've paid for Examine and I would pay for this. Here's my point of feedback / wishlist item / thing I think is missing from the world. Examine is focused on supplements, which I don't actually care that much about. If my question is "How do I lower my fasting blood glucose", I don't want a list of what supplements help with that, I want a list of everything that helps with that. If daily cardio is 100X as effective as green tea catechins then IDGAF about green tea. Examine broadened a bit, but it's still very supplement focused, which can give the false impression that some supplement is the best way to approach some condition. Going by the long covid example, it sounds like this glacierMD takes the broader focus of "here's all the things", which I absolutely love. And there could be a lot of value in that alone. But what I really feel is missing from the world is a comprehensive, salutogenic look at health. Yes I want to know what the best treatments are for long covid. But what I also really want to know is what is the rank ordered list of things I can do to develop and maintain a strong immune system. Or how do I lower my resting heart rate. What even is the optimal fasting blood glucose for that matter? Any searching you do will just tell you "above 100 mg/dL is prediabetic, 99 and below you're perfectly healthy". Anyway, I love the demo. The author is correct that it is missing from the world. And I 100% think people would pay for it once it grows enough. I do just hope that it isn't purely build around a pathogenic way of thinking, like just about everything else in the medical world seems to be.
  • bradhilton 4y ago
    Thanks for sharing examine.com, looks interesting!
  • AhmedF 4y ago
    > Here's my point of feedback / wishlist item / thing I think is missing from the world. Examine is focused on supplement That's exactly what we're doing! We released version 2 of Examine less than two weeks ago. Here's a page on how to use: https://examine.com/how-to-use/ https://examine.com/how-to-use/ It's still early, but the entire goal is to break down research on conditions and goals, and where they connect, relate them to interventions. Any questions, happy to answer them.
• lupire 4y ago
  I don't get the WebMD hate. It's leagues ahead of Healthline. WebMD is full of doctors. The gov and AMA should be sanctioning doctors for abuse of license if the content is bad.
  • joegahona 4y ago
    The atrocious UX isn't helping. Paginated articles, popups, autoplay ads within the well of content... these tactics put you in a bad neighborhood with bot-farm-type sites, no matter how many doctors are involved in the actual content creation.
    • lupire 4y ago
      If you don't use an ad blocker it's your own fault. Paginated articles are not a hill to die on.
  • ksdale 4y ago
    I don't really get it either. My biggest complaint is that they tell you to go see the doctor for everything and 9/10 of the time the doctor will tell you to go home and take ibuprofen and see what happens. I think it's generally possible to tell, based on what's provided on WebMD, what symptoms would cause a doctor to recommend an immediate trip to the ER or surgery or pharmaceuticals. It's required learning more than I would otherwise know about how my organs function, but I also don't think I know like... an exceptional amount about the human body.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• tern 4y ago
  The author alludes to subscription services, and I think this is bearing out to some extent. Twitter accounts like https://twitter.com/grimhood https://twitter.com/grimhood are passionate generalist SMEs who take money from Patreon and deliver deep dives into various health topics. We're in the early days, but this guy is basically a subscription preventive health doctor knocking out topics one by one.
• joegahona 4y ago
  > And every SEO expert knows that long articles rank higher than short ones, so now "treating covid headache" takes you to a thousand-word article when really I just want short summaries of the top three treatments. John Mueller from Google has been saying the opposite for years: https://www.reddit.com/r/bigseo/comments/clg1hn/how_to_find_word_count_in_serp/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bigseo/comments/clg1hn/how_to_find_...
• Invictus0 4y ago
  Has no one here heard of the Merck Manual? https://www.merckmanuals.com/professional https://www.merckmanuals.com/professional
• thenerdhead 4y ago
  WebMD and hypotheticals like this blog reminds me of a quote from Hamlet: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” I do not think you can make a good nor bad version of WebMD. But what it does today is makes you think about things that you're better off not thinking about. Health is subjective to start with. It is more qualitative than it is quantitative at the individual level. The exact problem of WebMD is that it uses the latter to help inform the former. I have got way more answers from old books than I can find online. Especially those on back pain, chronic illness, and even regular headaches. Much of this information is not new and even goes back to the idea that "thinking makes it so". The real question in my head is whether WebMD does more harm than it does good or vice versa. It's pointless to think about because it is what it is.
• awinter-py 4y ago
  'seo' appears only twice in this but deserves way more blame imo The life cycle of an article now seems to be 1) legit author in legit place, possibly paywalled, 2) worse copies elsewhere, with or without sources (I can't say how prevalent this pattern is, but you've seen it too, and if google has any nlp chops at all they are able to measure it in their index) even bad content doesn't come out of nowhere. an indexing platform that tried to tease out the 'copy of a copy' structure of the web would have a much easier time filtering out the blurry copies. not saying this is google's job, but they are the architects of the incentive structure here, and are in the best position to fix it if they wanted to
• monkmartinez 4y ago
  The first question would be; DO YOU HAVE A F**ING fever? If so treat that first, then call your doctor if that fails, then and only then do you call 911.
  • InCityDreams 4y ago
    Do you have an asterisk missing?
• wizofaus 4y ago
  Wikipedia exists despite all the barriers to doing so, yet remains generally an accurate and useful source of information that Google ranks highly. A version that's more tailored to health advice doesn't seem so hard to imagine... yet a quick Google brings up no evidence that anyone's tried to create one yet. Why is that?
• guerrilla 4y ago
  Someone already mentioned the NHS website, but also the Mayo Clinic's is great [2]. We have a great one run by the Swedish state too [3]. I think the article is wrong that "we accept" them though, they've just SEO spammed themselves over anything that actually is useful. It's not like we vote on search results (yet.) NHS, Mayo Clinic or others that must exist would be top if these assholes didn't scam their way in. 1. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/ https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/ 2. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions 3. https://www.1177.se https://www.1177.se
• SoftTalker 4y ago
  > researchers published eight million new health citations—a 47% increase in all published health knowledge. So why hasn't any of this innovation made online health information even slightly better? Because the vast majority of this research does not change the current "standard of care" for most health issues that anyone is likely to experience. Trying to be your own doctor by reading websites is stupid. Doctors go to school for 8 years and many do years more eductation and practial training in a specialty. You are not going to outsmart them by spending 10 minutes reading an article on a website. If you are sick, see a doctor. If you are not sick, get an annual checkup if it makes you worry less. This isn't so complicated.
  • Spivak 4y ago
    Your last paragraph alludes to the gap in MDs, their strength is is in identifying and treating acute conditions that require surface level knowledge of everything. You will absolutely “outsmart”(ie consistently get better advice) if you are able to find a community of people living with your condition. You will get incredibly in depth reviews of medications, long term results of interventions, management strategies, incredibly updated research analysis. Anyone who says just to go the doctor if you’re sick has never experienced the hellscape that is chronic conditions. The line between “we know exactly what is wrong with you and have 6 different treatment options” and getting diagnosed with “something-is-wrong-itis” is paper thin. No one is more obsessed with their disease then someone suffering from it 24/7.
    • SoftTalker 4y ago
      Fair point, but a long-term involvement with a "community of people living with X" is far different from reading WebMD's article on X. Just don't expect miracles. Many chronic diseases are poorly understood and don't have effective treatments. Wishful thinking from a support group doesn't change that, and all the website researc in the world won't change that either. My mom had ALS, we went to local support groups, and it was an utter waste of time, other than having other people to commiserate with.
• jaydepun 4y ago
  I, and my advisor's lab[1] work in this area. I'm going to focus on the technical aspects of evidence synthesis, as opposed to the business aspects. There's a difference between symptoms, diagnosis, treatment options, evidence for those, and the audiences for whom these are written. WebMD and friends target a broader market, scientific studies target...scientists and doctors. I think the hard parts of building a better WebMD (along the article's lines) are: - screening articles for relevance. This is more than mere search or finding potentially relevant articles, but also making a decision to include them - extracting _structured_ information from the articles. Frequently we talk about Populations/Problems, Interventions, Comparators (interventions), and (medical) Outcomes, collectively PICOs. Extraction of each component is easy. Assembling them is surprisingly hard. Finding equivalencies between them within documents is surprisingly hard. Finding facets or different parts of a treatment (how do you handle combined treatments for a single study? how about when some studies use them and some don't?) - establishing equivalencies for your evidence synthesis between documents is even harder: do you care about dosage? combination with other treatments? what happens when a slightly different formulation of a treatment gets used, or a treatment is administered poorly? I don't know of anyone within scholarly document processing community working on analysis of medical methods (possibly ignorance on my part!). It would be nice if trial preregistration had all these details, but not all trials are preregistered, nor all outcomes published, the aim of the trial can shift, and there's a large pile of literature where this information isn't available. I think real time updates are the smallest problem among these: solving extraction (including the big structured objects) mostly solves this; the statistics of a meta-analysis are not complicated. To be clear, this is still an issue. I have a figure[2] highlighting the lag. Presenting the evidence in a digestible, meaningful way, seems like a hard HCI problem to do right, and easy to do poorly. Merely giving PICOs (structured!) and findings is easy and a bad UX for the non-technical, a narrative summary is interesting to provide and hard to do well, and a subgroup analysis can suffer problems from differing group sizes and effectiveness findings (tailoring is tricky). There are several organizations[3] working on these sorts of problems. [1] https://www.byronwallace.com/ https://www.byronwallace.com/ [2] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/MS%CB%862%3A-Multi-Document-Summarization-of-Medical-DeYoung-Beltagy/d25121da56c9050137800c69520111b30201d1ed/figure/2 https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/MS%CB%862%3A-Multi-Doc... [3] https://community.cochrane.org/organizational-info/people/strategic-partnerships/partnerships https://community.cochrane.org/organizational-info/people/st...
• aeternum 4y ago
  A good WebMD would be probability based. Rather than list all the possibilities, it would calculate in real-time the probability of each diagnosis and show how that probability changes as you add/remove symptoms or possibly even test results. Even doctors would benefit from this as Bayesian inference is hard and even healthcare professionals generally put too much weight on a single positive test result.
• lbriner 4y ago
  The article does smell a bit like "tech can fix everything" when the problem with WebMD and others is not that they are full of ads or SEO optimisation. The simple truth is that medical care is more complex than just "headache = paracetomol". Some drugs don't work on some people, others might be more effective but more expensive. Some are not compatible with e.g. pregnancy or other drugs you might be taken. As for symptom identification, many of us have seen "House MD" and should know that pain + swelling could be any of about 1000 conditions. This is why we still need Doctors. Sure, us "clever" types might be able to self-diagnose 90% of the time but we need the doctor who can see the pale skin, the yellow eyes, who asks about recent changes in lifestyle or health, things that we could easily miss. Now if you could encapsulate all of that on WebMD....
• AhmedF 4y ago
  To summarize: a good version of WebMD would have: * structured, quantitative information * real-time updates * summaries of supporting evidence I'm obviously very biased, but that is exactly what we're building with www.Examine.com
• foolinaround 4y ago
  maybe a new wikipedia, where not any tom, dick or harry gets to write/edit articles, but one who is acknowledged as a subject matter expert? To start with, in each topic, there is a broad expert, and then he creates additional topics, and names experts in this, and so on....
• AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  A lot like wikipedia. Which begs the question: why is wikipedia the best source of medical information online? Doctors, research hospitals, and the like should be required to maintain best of breed public health information. Public universities are funded to the level of A TRILLION DOLLARS A YEAR. Think about that.
• Tao3300 4y ago
  > brief feelings similar to electric shock To be fair, that's a side effect of stopping the medication suddenly. They ought to have worded that better. Happens when I forget to order more of my own preferred SSRI. As far as electric shocks go, it's definitely on the milder end of the spectrum (I suspect most of the commentariat here have some experience with such things) -- more unusual than painful. Sometimes we call them "brain zaps", which would probably sound even worse on WebMD.
• entwife 4y ago
  Merck Manuals, also known as MSD Manuals, can be accessed here: https://www.msdmanuals.com/ https://www.msdmanuals.com/ This is a fact-based, peer-reviewed, classic manual of Western medicine.
  • entwife 4y ago
    Also, Merck manual consumer version is free to access online. It should be a first stop for medical information.
• 7373737373 4y ago
  Something I'd like is a diagnosis tool that worked similar to the software dispatchers use to obtain information from the caller
• hrdwdmrbl 4y ago
  I think it would need to ask more questions. Interrogate the question asker more, like a doctor would
• matheusmoreira 4y ago
  It would look like an open access UpToDate.
• brailsafe 4y ago
  I like Healthline
• permo-w 4y ago
  >satisfaction with online health information is incredibly low, around 38% I wonder what satisfaction with offline health information is
• plankers 4y ago
  it would be run by a publicly-funded consortium of doctors, social scientists, and public health experts with no mandate to earn a profit, for one.
• jas- 4y ago
  Real world metrics on causes. Totals of cases, known vs unknown cases and a percentage associated to each possible cause based on those variables?
• strstr 4y ago
  A better WebMD already exists, and it’s called UpToDate. It’s target audience is doctors, but you can pay ~$20 for a week as a consumer (you can pay less per week for longer also). It’s a great resource, and has a summary of the most recent consensus view on common medical topics. It doesn’t expand pages out with fluff or talk down to you, though it won’t have too much info about assumed medical fundamentals. You can pull the citations and look up the references. Reading it makes your appreciate why WebMD exists. Not everyone wants to read highly technical medical jargon and read medical papers. But the HN audience probably has a lot of folks that are down to do that, and I strongly recommend UpToDate for those that do. I use almost every time I have a substantial new issue that requires a physician visit.
  • blandry 4y ago
    I can give a nice example of how some of UpToDate’s information is compiled, and why its so high quality. I built a new diagnostic test that replaced and upgraded upon one that had previously been discontinued. After building it a clinician who is a top expert on that specific diagnostic reached out since he was responsible for the relevant up to date page. We had a knowledgeable discussion and they gained a full understanding of the diagnostic I had built. After that they wrote up a new and high quality UpToDate piece describing the new diagnostic and its clinical usefulness. Overall it felt like a very effective process, and one that happened pretty early on in the life cycle of the new product.
• mattacular 4y ago
  A functional healthcare system irl would be a good start
• mitchellst 4y ago
  Article sums it up as: there hasn't been a better WebMD because the costs of making one have been too high, but new advances promise to draw those costs down, so the author is founding. Costs might be a factor. But revenue is a bigger one. WebMD and Healthline have flourished because advertisers have an incentive to underwrite them. Symptom checkers for health professionals do well, too—hospitals and medical malpractice insurers have an incentive to pay for provider-focused tools. A comment brings up the UK NHS site—sure, it makes sense that a national health system would have a strong incentive to help people self diagnose. Do end users have a similarly strong incentive to maintain a subscription to a service like this month after month? Selling direct-to-consumer subscriptions at scale is hard. I wish you the best, but it's tough business.
• flerovium 4y ago
  Answer: append "mayo" to medical searches https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/coronavirus-long-term-effects/art-20490351 https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i... In 10 years, they have never failed me.