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?
What would a “good” WebMD look like?
51–60 of 323 posts
Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?
#52Why 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…
> 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.
Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?
#53A 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/ . It has no advertising and provides short, easily readable and actionable i…
Is that NHS page what people go to webMD for? I feel like that's something else entirely.
It's my first time seeing it, but it seems like yes.
I have a relatively new mole that I thought looked a bit funny, so I awhile ago now I looked up what malignant ones look like, thankfully it doesn't seem to be.
This page is definitely clearer and more concise than what I found at the time: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/moles/
Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?
#54I 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.
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!
Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?
#55Sure 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…
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.
Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?
#56Unpopular 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 w…
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".
Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?
#57The 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 bus…
> Try looking up information about gardening, plant management, home improvement
I found a particularly egregious offender the other day.. the #2 result for "best cordless screwdriver" is one of those content farms that made a "Best of 2022" article. Their top recommendation in 2022 is an old NiCad one that was discontinued in 2015!
Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?
#58A 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/ . It has no advertising and provides short, easily readable and actionable i…
One issue with the NHS is that I get the impression the information they publish that strongly respects their goals and desires perhaps to the detriment of patients sometimes.
I’ve certainly noticed in the past big differences in advice. The NHS will downplay and not suggest investigations whereas another (non UK) site does the opposite.
The NHS advice surely is carefully crafted not to cause unnecessary (from their point of view) GP visits, tests etc.
Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?
#59I'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.
Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?
#60WebMD 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…
Looks like UpToDate is $60 a month, or you can subscribe for a week for $20.
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.