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Google almost convinced me to spend $400 on useless laser treatments

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Re: Google almost convinced me to spend $400 on useless laser treatments

#311

Post by 93po »

es7 wrote: post #157

Low-quality SEO content marketing has been taking up more and more of Google Search results in the past decade. Maybe it has always been this way, but anecdotally it feels like it has gotten so much worse in the last few years. The exception to the SEO spam rule seems to be a small subset of “highly trusted sources”, that at least for medical information seem to be biased pretty heavily towards “don’t say anything th…

It's about to become uncontrollably bad. With really powerful artificially generated writing available, spammers will develop it to be indistinguishable from real human writers when analyzed by google's own machines. We're going to have billions of websites that are 100% generated, with content that most humans can't distinguish as entirely generated, and a LOT of it is going to be wrong. It will completely drown out human written content to the point that websites using humans will give up, and there will only be spam left.

Re: Google almost convinced me to spend $400 on useless laser treatments

#312

Post by tyrfing »

FollowingTheDao wrote: post #234
bryanlarsen wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lupus is really hard to diagnose. There's a reason that ends up being the diagnosis on pretty much every episode of House M.D. Doctors generally see 6 patients an hour, and have 5-7 minutes of paperwork per patient. The remaining 3 minutes gives enough time to diagnose the obvious, but not much else.

It is not hard to diagnose once you eventually get to a person that can diagnose it. You said it yourself. It is not about difficultly, but time spent with the patient. But I literally showed my doctor the cutaneous lupus in my ear and she said "Oh, some people just get gunk in their ears" and would not send me to a rheumatologist. The slow diagnosis is because the specialists are so reluctant to see people. Right no…

> Right now I am on a six month wait to see a rheumatologist. Why? Capitalism.

Typically that's anti-capitalist: there are very strong government and regulatory limits on who can perform the services, and for self-serving reasons, they maintain shortages of supply. The free-market capitalist solution would be for prices to rise to a point where supply and demand are balanced, either by supply increasing (people switching fields), or reduced demand from prices rising.

Re: Google almost convinced me to spend $400 on useless laser treatments

#313

Post by noasaservice »

wackget wrote: post #239
noasaservice wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yuck. I did completely miss that this was just a shitty advert complaining about other shitty adverts.

I'll ask you what I asked the other commenter: should articles which point out problems be written completely independently of the people creating solutions to those problems? Even if it is an advert, it's not a shitty one. It presents scientific arguments and is well-sourced. It's about as a good as an "advert" as you'd ever get. Really, what more do you want from people?

Frankly, I'm just done with advertisements and commercial "speech" being normalized everywhere, including in articles, regular speech amongst humans, and more. I've been done with commercialism fake "culture" for a LONG time. And the more we have, the worse the pollution is with genuine conversations.

I think that's the real problem with articles like this. The moment I realized it was a commercial piece masquerading as a scholarly meta-article, I have to question all the previous discussion they have. Is it right? What are they trying to sell? What viewpoint are they trying to get me to follow?

Advertising is codified monetary deceit. We've moved long past "Buy my soda cause its yummy", to an ever-present dread of "if you dont have this, you'll be sorry" in a round-about way.

> should articles which point out problems be written completely independently of the people creating solutions to those problems?

If there's a commercial motive to use/buy/rent their shhit, absolutely yes.

> It presents scientific arguments and is well-sourced.

Depends. What are the biases of their arguments that the underlying commercialism is modifying? It now needs its own analysis to see if they were trying to sell me something different on dread or FOMO.

Re: Google almost convinced me to spend $400 on useless laser treatments

#314

Post by elliekelly »

floren wrote: post #236
matsemann wrote: post #12

Why are dentists so scammy? In Norway I've seen documentaries about them sending the same people to multiple dentists, and some of them receive wildly different advice. Some of that can be ascribed to some being in the school of pro-active, so they want to fix your teeth at the first glance of issues. But in the end, most of the things being quoted were unnecessary. They all seemed very intent on removing wisdom teet…

We recently moved and my wife & I both scheduled checkups at the same new dentist. She recommended a crown replacement and Invisalign to both of us, in my case while wearing an Invisalign-branded face shield. We both got weird vibes from that place and don't intend to go back. Didn't help that the hygienist said something like "oh, the crown replacement is easy, we just got a brand new machine to make them in-house!"…

I had a very similar experience with a new dentist this week and the front desk was very pushy with getting me to schedule an appointment for a routine cleaning. I'm still mad at myself for acquiescing but they were determined to steamroll right over all of my attempts to politely demur. I don't intend to return to the practice but I am absolutely dreading the phone call to cancel the appointment because I know I'm in for even more of their aggressive "encouragement" to change my mind.

Re: Google almost convinced me to spend $400 on useless laser treatments

#315

Post by LouisSayers »

donatj wrote: post #17
matsemann wrote: post #12

Why are dentists so scammy? In Norway I've seen documentaries about them sending the same people to multiple dentists, and some of them receive wildly different advice. Some of that can be ascribed to some being in the school of pro-active, so they want to fix your teeth at the first glance of issues. But in the end, most of the things being quoted were unnecessary. They all seemed very intent on removing wisdom teet…

I went to a new dentist for a broken filling and they tried to tell me I had 14 cavities and set me down with a finance person to set up a payment plan for how I was going to pay for them over the next 5 years. I went to a second dentist, they fixed the broken filling and said my teeth were otherwise fine. I have the paperwork to back this up. I’d been seeing another dentist for a while and he suddenly wanted to crow…

I had a similar experience with a dentist.

All my previous experiences I had minimal issues, and then suddenly at a different dentist I needed several fillings and needed to drill a good tooth to "fix a cavity" in-between my teeth.

I didn't get any of that done.

My next visit at a different dentist a couple years later and I had a single tooth that needed a filling.

When something feels off, it's always good to get a second opinion.

Re: Google almost convinced me to spend $400 on useless laser treatments

#316

Post by cyberlurker »

darknavi wrote: post #271
cyberlurker wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately Reddit discussions can be made to look genuine when they are really corporate advertising.

Certainly, although I find subject-based subreddits are a lot less tolerant of a lot of that BS.

I don’t have a source off hand but I definitely read an article about how Mods are routinely contacted by advertisers. I’m not saying every subreddit is a bunch of corporate shills but we are basically trusting unpaid volunteers to not take payments to look the other way.

Re: Google almost convinced me to spend $400 on useless laser treatments

#317

Post by hn_version_0023 »

Whenever I see an article about the US healthcare system, I’m forced to wonder:

How is this system itself not a cruel and unusual punishment? Now obviously it’s because it isn’t applied as a punishment for a crime, which is I think the letter of the law.

Still, it feels like we live in some Kafka-esque nightmare where a huge number of things the US government ought to take care of are outright cruel… and that the cruelty is the point.

Re: Google almost convinced me to spend $400 on useless laser treatments

#318

Post by FollowingTheDao »

throw10920 wrote: post #297
JamesBarney wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are too many patients and not enough doctors. This isn't caused by capitalism, capitalism doesn't limit the # of doctors. Becoming socialist doesn't magically allow doctors to see patients for twice as long. If we had socialism more people could afford doctors(a good thing!) but it would make this specific problem worse, because there would be more patients. This is caused by the AMA lobbying to limit the suppl…

> This is caused by the AMA lobbying to limit the supply of doctors in order to drive up salaries. This. This is the problem - not the vague spectre of "capitalism" being waved around.

Since when do salaries have nothing to do with capitalism?

Re: Google almost convinced me to spend $400 on useless laser treatments

#319

Post by chasd00 »

brimble wrote: post #129
jnovek wrote: post #40

“ Medicine has become a three-way negotiation between you, your doctor, and The Algorithm.” This characterization makes it sound like a good thing. In reality, the doctor’s responsibility is being pushed to the patient because they are overbooked in the name of economic efficiency. As a patient with complex, non-specific medical condition, I can tell you how miserable this is. I can’t count on doctors _at all_ to mov…

Can confirm. They paint people who google symptoms as kooks or as annoying, but you have to if you ever want to get an actual diagnosis and treatment, because doctors and hospitals are, quite often, worse than Google at figuring out WTF is wrong. Do your best not to end up in a hospital without an advocate (friend, relative) watching out for you. They'll fail to treat you at best, then discharge you with a shrug and…

i never go under without someone there with me. My father was almost killed twice be incompetent nurses double dosing IVs and other things. My mother, an RN herself, watched him like a hawk every time he was in the hospital to keep the staff from killing him.

Another anecdote, my sister worked at the front desk in some department ( she was an admin and not a nurse) and a patient coded but came back by themselves. Only afterwards did the nurses realize they were marked "do not resucicate" by mistake!

i do not trust hospitals at all.

Re: Google almost convinced me to spend $400 on useless laser treatments

#320

Post by JamesBarney »

FollowingTheDao wrote: post #318
throw10920 wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is caused by the AMA lobbying to limit the supply of doctors in order to drive up salaries. This. This is the problem - not the vague spectre of "capitalism" being waved around.

Since when do salaries have nothing to do with capitalism?

The Soviet Union had wages to, and far worse problems with shortages then capitalistic countries have ever had.
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