251–260 of 323 posts
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.
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 e…
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.
This is a fact-based, peer-reviewed, classic manual of Western medicine.
> 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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 h…
They actually do dance around a claim regarding cancer: > Many essential oils have antioxidant properties. Antioxidants help prevent damage to cells caused by free radicals. This damage can lead to serious diseases such as cancer. For comparison, Wikipedia: > Aromatherapy may be useful to induce relaxation, but there is not sufficient evidence that essential oils can effectively treat any condition.
https://www.healthline.com/health/tea-tree-oil-for-nail-fung...
"Results of a 1994 studyTrusted Source found pure tea tree oil was equally as effective as the antifungal clotrimazole (Desenex) in treating fungal toenail infections. Clotrimazole is available both over the counter (OTC) and by prescription."
Reading through the wikipedia article it seems they're conflating all use of essential oils and specifically the use of essential oils in aromatherapy treatment, which is what the linked article is about.
Also fair point on the cancer line but:
https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/d...
"In laboratory and animal studies, the presence of increased levels of exogenous antioxidants has been shown to prevent the types of free radical damage that have been associated with cancer development" -- which seems close to what they were saying. A bit overstated for something published to the public, but technically accurate.
Overall it seems like the dismissal is a bias of the idea of essential oils, not necessarily a comprehensive review of the literature.
Merck Manuals, also known as MSD Manuals, can be accessed here: https://www.msdmanuals.com/ This is a fact-based, peer-reviewed, classic manual of Western medicine.
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 qu…
I hop ur toes get gooder.
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 t…
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 wi…