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What would a “good” WebMD look like?

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Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?

#221

Post by jmye »

switch007 wrote: post #58
jjar wrote: post #15

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/ . 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…

> 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.

Do you have data that supports the NHS withholding or advising against necessary care that results in worse patient outcomes?

More utilization is not inherently better, and even in the systems like the NHS, everyone is incented heavily to keep patients healthy and out of the hospital system. The idea that they want you to be sicker rather than provide relatively cheap preventive care is, generally, absolute nonsense.

Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?

#222

Post by aeternum »

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.

Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?

#223

Post by nradov »

gtirloni wrote: post #66
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit of a conundrum; on the one side, the NHS and (in a different area) MDN are better, more authoritative, etc sources, so Google should promote those. On the other, this would mean that Google can no longer cite neutrality or hide behind "the algorithm", as has been their legal defense against a ton of lawsuits where the suers said one websites should go higher or lower in the rankings.

If it's a human curating content or an algorithm doing so, I don't see how that helps Google on a lawsuit. Unless they blame sentience. The best algorithms adapt to feedback. Surely Google's own algorithm can accept Google's feedback to adjust for flaws in it.

What lawsuit? There is no legal basis for a lawsuit. As a private corporation, Google is free to rank search results however they like regardless of whether that's done by humans or algorithms.

Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?

#224

Post by Melatonic »

ravenstine wrote: post #31
jjar wrote: post #15

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/ . It has no advertising and provides short, easily readable and actionable i…

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'…

I still have a super old merck manual I keep just in case of emergencies. Makes me wonder if I should be purchasing one that is up to date.....

Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?

#225

Post by Melatonic »

jjar wrote: post #15

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/ . It has no advertising and provides short, easily readable and actionable i…

What would be better if basic stuff like this was part of our public education system. We need the equivalent of "shop" class but for basic medical needs. Wilderness First Aid would be a good start

Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?

#226

Post by Melatonic »

winternett wrote: post #210
tmoravec wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google can make or break any online business they want to. It is what it is... We let them get there... That being said, I haven't even tried to use Bing, and it's pretty much impossible to convince me that Microsoft Edge is worth a second look after all the years of MSIE, and how Windows has been slowly devolving over time. If worst comes to worst, just add "reddit" to your search term, and then all you have to do i…

Edge is chromium based now so......

Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?

#227

Post by hattmall »

rootusrootus wrote: post #89
tmoravec wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Sounds like a Google problem and apparently only a Google problem. I want something like webrings to become A Thing again. A user curated search engine. And the users doing the curated need to be vetted. I don't know if this is even possible, but I get tired of having to come to HN to get a human recommendation that is miles better than the algorithmic crap from the current search engines.

T100 sites and the like seemed to be the peak of discovering interesting and relevant content to me.

Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?

#228

Post by mikkergp »

kwertyoowiyop wrote: post #4

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…

I just read the essential oils article and it doesn’t seem that bad? They recommend lavender for sleep, aromatherapy for stress reduction and tea tree oils for foot fungus. It’s not great, but as far as trying to be objective goes, it’s not like they’re arguing it cures cancer. They could, as I think is covered more generally provide more data, but while I don’t think we should swallow “alternative therapies” whole hog, I don’t think we should be biased against them just because they sound woo-ey. The evidence should speak for itself. what was your specific beef with the essential oils article(as compared to other WebMD articles)

Also interesting he contrasted it with Aspirin, because ironically, I don’t think pain killers have all that much power when studied against placebo.(heart benefits notwithstanding)

For example: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19673707/

Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?

#229

Post by fredophile »

zeruch wrote: post #188
ajmurmann wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's where I continue to want to see what results in a search engine would look like that heavily punishes presence of advertisements in a result. All the SEO spam pages are ad-driven, so cutting out anything following that incentive should result in removal of all pages that follow that terrible SEO spam pattern that ruins search results.

"that heavily punishes presence of advertisements in a result." while that is pleasing to read at face value, it has two fundamental problems: 1. it's orthogonal to relevance of content (semi-solvable algorithmically I suspect) 2. it's antithetical to Google's core business model (a lot tougher nut to crack)

> it's orthogonal to relevance of content

I disagree. The way content is presented matters. Splitting an article into 4-6 pages and filling those pages with ads makes me not want to read that content. I'd much rather go somewhere that has the same text in a single page and only a few ads.

Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?

#230

Post by markdown »

bombcar wrote: post #26
stevage wrote: post #17

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 bus…

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 alon…

> They've almost all died out

I'm a member of a few active old-school forums. The reason they didn't grow like StackOverflow did is because you really need to spend a lot of time reading through garbage (small talk, etc) to get to the good stuff.

The answer to the question (as posed in the title), might be 3 pages away. With StackOverflow, the answer is almost always immediately under the question since it's been voted into that position.

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