I'm so sick of every single medical-related question people have online constantly getting spammed with 'talk to your doctor!!!!'

The way people online constantly say ‘talk to your doctor’ like it’s a panacea is a lot like how medieval peasants weren’t able to read scripture and they just had to trust their clergy’s interpretations

Sick of it. Usually it’s not even like if I’m trying to find out if I have fucking cancer, I’m saying oh i feel sad in the evenings. why in the NAME of GOD would i want to then, for that, find the guy’s number, call, leave a message cause it’s midnight, wait for them to call back, schedule something 2 weeks later, worry the whole time, and try to remember and rephrase in formal clinical terminology exactly what’s happening and get formal cold clinical advice for it from a guy I see twice a year. Just tell me! Give me colloquial advice and home remedies! good god!

There could be so many miracle tips or tricks online that really work but nooo people constantly shout ‘talk to your doctor! call your doctor!’ i don’t want to fucking call the doctor, medical environments give me anxiety and all the bureaucracy and insurance and bills don’t help matters either.

some zoomers on tiktok seem to get this and happily share ‘oh this worked for me!’ and usually it’s somewhat helpful and a very nice, casual interaction that doesn’t involve interaction with an authority figure and potential bills. it’s that easy.

‘ooh what about liability’ don’t care. liability has destroyed modern america, gatekeeping knowledge behind a culture of fear. if you’re so scared about liability over a reddit comment, simply don’t say anything! rather than leaving a pointless piece of advice that every single person on the planet knows is the default ‘ideal’ answer, that isn’t necessarily actionable for many who don’t have easy or trivial access to healthcare.

dustyData, (edited )

There could be so many miracle tips or tricks online

There aren’t. We call the tips and tricks that work medicine. And we train doctors and nurses and associated healthcare workers to know them or know who knows the tricks to refer people to them.

The guys discovering new tips and tricks that work will tell them to the doctors first, and not the internet, and are almost exclusively doctors themselves.

This stupid belief is literally what killed idiots injecting horse medicine without supervision during the last pandemic.

tunetardis,

If I were chronically sad in the evenings, I would actually bring it up with the doctor. I wouldn’t make a special appointment for it necessarily unless its progressing towards suicidal thoughts or something, but during a regular visit I would bring it up. I’m no stranger to mood disorders, and frankly, I wish I had approached a professional sooner about it. Would have saved a lot of grief not just for me but for family members who also suffered through my episodes.

For something that seems too minor for a doctor visit, I would suggest speaking to a pharmacist. They are readily available without appointment or long waits, and have an encyclopedic knowledge of all sorts of over-the-counter remedies that are backed up by an advanced degree in medicine. Definitely an underutilized resource. Of course they may well suggest you talk to a doctor, but in my experience at least, they give thoughtful consideration to what you have to say and make such a recommendation not out of some lazy buck-passing but rather a genuine concern for your condition. So you would do well to heed their advice, whatever it might be.

Death_Equity,

“I have had a dry cough for the past few months.” Can mean all sorts of things. Random speculation from somebody working off of very limited information can lead someone to try a “cure” that masks or exacerbates an otherwise treatable or eventually deadly condition.

There is a reason doctors have to go through so much school and gain so much experience before they become an “actual doctor”.

Do you have a 10cm mass in your right lung, or do you have allergies? A doctor visit can tell you if your cough can be treated with medication or surgery and chemo that you will die without.

I am not someone who likes to go to the doctor if I know that I can’t treat myself, but you can be damn sure I will not ask the internet if it is something I have no idea about.

I’d love it if healthcare was top of the line and free as air, but that is not the world we live in and people giving people medical advice with an unknown level of expertise and next to no empirical evidence of a diagnosis gets people killed or harmed. Let the information doctors have be freely available for people to use as they see fit for their personal use and all medication be cheap as dirt, but medical advice should only come from a licensed doctor that is qualified to practice medicine and not some stranger on the internet that barely has the experience and ability to treat a simple laceration.

Lath,

"I have had a dry cough for the past few months."

You have esophageal cancer. You're welcome.

towerful,

I looked up your symptoms online, and it says here you might have “internet connectivity issues”

Lath,

I did! How'd you know?

Jikiya,

One of the best Parks and Recreation lines of all time.

Death_Equity,

Thanks WebMD, you are the best. I guess I need to get some essential oils, acupuncture, and change my diet to 100% durian.

Lath,

Also only drink water straight from a mineral spring source.

Death_Equity,

I know just the one down the hill from the chicken plant, thanks again!

fuckingkangaroos, (edited )

Essential oils and “100% of x” diets are nonsense, but acupuncture has a good track record. I doubt you can find anything on WebMD seriously suggesting using either of the first two.

Death_Equity,

Acupuncture therapy is a Chinese parallel to chiropractic “medicine” in terms of efficacy compared to peer-reviewed modern medicine.

Studies have shown acupuncture to be roughly equal to phramacotherapy, but with multiple hours a week invested in relaxing immobile in a dimly lit room with soft music and a placebo bias to treat strain and stress ailments like migranes.

Every “treatment” I mentioned is equally bullshit ways to deal with anything a placebo can’t effectively treat. Go get stabbed in a strip mall and I don’t care how big the wound channel is, not my monkey and not my circus and I ain’t buying them peanuts from a clown.

fuckingkangaroos,

Huh, after some poking around yeah, it doesn’t have the scientific support I thought it did. It seems to effect the nervous system and tissue beyond what can be explained by placebo… but not by much. At least it isn’t actually dangerous like chiropractors.

Death_Equity,

Depends on if the needles are clean.

xep,

Taking medical advice from random strangers on the internet can be dangerous, sometimes in ways that may not be immediately obvious. I used to have anxiety about a medical condition that I was convinced that I had, and everything I read on the internet just made me more and more anxious.

Eventually, I went to see a doctor, who cleared everything up. But until then, I was a wreck.

Please see a doctor for medical advice.

AFKBRBChocolate,

The things is, the stakes can be really high, even for something that seems benign. The people who give you medical advice based on a text post really are being irresponsible. Doctors are trained to ask the right questions and do the right tests. Sure, we might like it if we could just crowd source our diagnosis, but it’s a really, really bad idea for most things.

zeppo,
@zeppo@lemmy.world avatar

I have a couple fairly serious chronic conditions and discuss them with a wide variety of people online. Sometimes it’s apparent that the knowledge level of someone asking a question is just way too much to be filled in with a reddit comment, and the consequences of them getting it wrong could be very dangerous or fatal - for instance, discussing insulin dosage. Some people rely on their doctor for every adjustment, while others have experience and knowledge and feel comfortable making their own changes to ratios or basal dosage. If someone sounds sorta of clueless I sure as hell am not going to tell them to adjust their dosage in a way that could land them in a hospital or kill their kid or something and at those times, the best advice is “you should probably ask your doctor”.

PeepinGoodArgs,

There could be so many miracle tips or tricks online that really work

“You know what they call alternative medicine that’s been proved to work? - Medicine.” ― Tim Minchin

I’m not really sure you understand just how complicated being a doctor is and making the correct diagnosis is. Sure, it might be something small if you feel sad in the evenings. It might also be a brain tumor. Home remedies might work in both cases, and they might not.

But you know what will probably work more often that not? A doctor’s prescription.

Talk to you doctor.

_number8_,

yeah, this is exactly what i mean.

“Talk to you doctor.” i love that, like a mic drop. i don’t understand people’s burning desire to be so ostentatious about this point. yes yes yes obviously that is the best case scenario. congratulations, you posted the most generic answer to any question, take 40 points, awesome. it’s just this arbitrary blind faith in authority – can you imagine how many billions of dollars are spent by health insurance companies in the US to cultivate this exact line of thought in the populace? 100 years ago they only recently discovered you needed to wash your hands, and people act like they’re infallible deities.

“You know what they call alternative medicine that’s been proved to work? - Medicine.”

great, and now it’s gatekept to doctors only rather than being accessible to the common populace. W.

Tenniswaffles,

You would trust random idiots on the internet to give you medical advice? How fucking stupid. People have died because of bad advice given on the internet, and you want to encourage this?

For every “miracle tip” there’s at least 10 fuckwits giving potentially dangerous advice.

Harvey656,

This is without a doubt the worst take I have ever read ever. All that knowledge is on the internet in ebooks by the way. Don’t want to go to the doctor? Learn.

JackiesFridge,
@JackiesFridge@lemmy.world avatar

So if you get in a horrible accident and lose a limb, make sure to ask the internet for advice as you bleed out. Don’t be a sucker for “big surgeon” and bow to authority.

It if your house burns down, ask a bunch of randos to help rebuild it. You don’t want to support that multi-billion-dollar construction industry.

Consider for a moment that most doctors actually know what they’re doing and the beef you have is with a dystopian society that’s figured out how to commodify basic needs to a point where we all need to “earn” our very existence.

retrospectology, (edited )
@retrospectology@lemmy.world avatar

It’s a generic answer because it’s the only responsible answer. To give someone medical advice when you have no medical expertise is highly irresponsible because not only are you potentially misleading the person asking, but countless others who read the discussion.

It should only ever be “talk to your doctor” because medical advice is one thing the Internet cannot provide and no one should be enlisting others in helping them treat their health as some kind of horoscope.

scrubbles,
@scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech avatar

The amount of times I’ve been online and misdiagnosed myself, man I don’t even know. Worst case was I convinced myself I had afib. Knew it, from all of my reading and everything I had all the symptoms.

Except I didn’t have them, because since I’ve never experienced the symptoms I thought I had the symptoms, but I did not.

The knowledge isn’t “gatekept”, it’s not something they hide away in a chest. It takes 10 years of medical school and several more after that of on the job training just to be a junior doctor. Talk about minimizing how complex the human body and all possible ailments are. We go to doctors not for the 15 minutes in the exam room with them, but because of the decades of knowledge they learned so we didn’t have to.

JackGreenEarth,

Anyone can become a doctor and learn the same knowledge, it’s just a lot of effort. No one is stopping you.

stoly,

And amazingly it’s not a question of intelligence, but rather tenacity. It’s really a lot of time and work but most people could do it if they had the willingness and opportunity.

Toes,

It’s mostly a boiler plate response to avoid being sued in case they suggest something that ends up leaving you worse than if they had said nothing at all

ryathal,

Taking internet medical advice can help you, do nothing, or leave you with permanent damage.

Talking to a doctor is unlikely to cause additional harm.

Boozilla,

I agree with you. However, in part this is often done because giving or receiving medical advice online is generally ill advised. There can, in theory, even be legal concerns (potentially). Say someone gives bad advice and the person is harmed from it. I also think that all the misinformation that got disseminated during the pandemic left people gun-shy on these topics.

But I still agree with you in spirit. The “talk to your doctor” thing can be a too cold and reflexive with some folks. And there are a few home remedies that do work. And maybe the person asking just wants some emotional support and not the usual soulless canned advice.

This topic reminds me of people who automatically throw an 800 number out there whenever certain key words get mentioned. There’s almost always good intentions behind that. But in the USA at least, calling such a number can make a person’s life much worse. Loss of agency followed by a huge medical bill. Because it’s not really about helping the person. It’s about optics and collecting money.

fuckingkangaroos,

Agreed, my experience supports what you’re saying. I’ve had dangerous advice and prescriptions from doctors, and great advice from online that’s produced long-term resolutions to health problems.

Yeah there’s a lot of nonsense out there, you have to be savvy, so yes, some people should just stick with visiting professionals.

Long term, I’ve had better results for a lot of issues when I’ve gone online and learned vs when I’ve gone through the process of visiting multiple highly rated providers, including specialists. I’ve also been able to develop a good understanding of how my body works which has allowed me to develop a better wellness-oriented approach to my health.

Sad to see so many people in this thread ignoring what you actually said and attacking you with straw man arguments and extreme edge case scenarios.

_number8_,

exactly, yes, thank you. it drives me insane when people act like they’re so infallible that it automatically makes everyone else wrong, immoral even, for even giving advice. if they’re typing from canada or the UK or europe that’s one thing, cause it is more trivial to talk to a doctor, but in the US it’s extremely obnoxious and presumptuous when you damn well know the way this country works yet still constantly badger people about it, with this attitude that of course i don’t know what’s best for me, nor should i even attempt to find out myself or double check or find other opinions, of course not, how dare i. the only corroboration allowed is making another appointment with another doctor. it’s my body and life. when i was 15 i diagnosed myself with an extremely rare speech disorder two weeks before the expensive ENT did the same thing except with far more bluntness and insensitivity. haven’t cared much for the outright worship of them since.

maybe the reason most medical advice online is so ‘untrustworthy’ is because everyone’s been yelling this for 20 years so the only people bothering to try are the real kooks.

fuckingkangaroos,

Yeah. I trust medical professionals but they’re far from perfect. They might prescribe you expensive pills for digestive problems before teaching you about the importance of fiber, or give you powerful psychoactive medication before introducing you to cognitive behavioral therapy.

Everyone’s worried about liability, which is fine if you’re giving paid medical advice, but stomping on people trying to learn about health issues isn’t the way to handle it.

xia,

Abdication to authority, with a hint of hivemind mass-formation.

Jimmyeatsausage,

Sorry that you’re going through something OP. Everything I say after this is probably something you don’t want to hear, so read on at your peril.

The reason people tell you to go to your doctor when you ask for medical advice online is because the question itself implies you want good or useful advice and nobody besides you’re medical team can give you that. You can find some general stuff online or ask to speak to a different doctor if there’s trust issues with your current provider, but nobody without access to your personal medical history is able to advise you accurately. It takes at least 8 years of constant study to be a newbie doctor. Human bodies are extremely complex, and we still don’t know how everything works. Even if we did, not all bodies work the same way. On top of that, humans are shit at statistics, and we heavily bias anecdotal evidence, especially when it is our own anecdote or from someone we know.

Here’s a simple example.

Say I get an upset stomach after eating meals and I complain about it to a friend. Trying to be helpful, they told me they used to get that too, so they tried switching to a vegetarian diet, and they got better. Sounds innocent enough, right? I know what vegetarian means (it’s “common sense”, right?) so I stop eating meat and start getting salads or fruit for lunch instead. After about a week, I fell asleep while driving home. Turns out, I’m anemic. I was getting just enough iron on my old diet to keep the worst symptoms that would have scared me enough to see a doctor at bay, but when I cut out meat I went from iron deficient to anemic. Had I gone to the doctor, they’d have easily seen my iron deficiency and put me on a supplement or advised me how to change my diet, and the nausea would have gone away. Instead, I end up imaking my condition worse and landing in the ER after an auto crash.

That didn’t actually happen, but I think it’s a good example for several reasons. It’s a common side effect (nausea) of a common problem (iron deficiency) that you’re likely to think doesn’t warrant a doctor, but you’d still mention to a friend. It’s a super common symptom associated with lots of conditions. The friend even gave good advice (for most people, changing their diet wouldn’t have been an issue, but because of an underlying medical condition specific to our protagonist, it was bad advice FOR THEM). The friend had no way of knowing or even suspecting it could be dangerous advice because most people don’t spend a decade learning about the body and disease more generally and they didn’t know about the specific issues related to the specific case. It’s the same reason you shouldn’t get legal advice online… It’s a super complex system, and every case is literally different.

HubertManne,
HubertManne avatar

I was initially going to upvote this but the fact is that if someone cannot go to a doctor and get something resolved they will look elsewhere. Whether its a failure of the medical system or limitations of our medical technology there are many reasons someone cannot get treatment or even advice. That being said if one has access to speak to a doctor that should always be their first action.

ElpaisTurd,

I think you should talk to your doctor

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