Back when I was a kid, my mom had a 1,000 page book that is more or less what this article is asking for. I wonder what ever happened to that book. (Are there newer editions, for example?)
Sounds like the Merck Manual. (see other comments for links)
What would a “good” WebMD look like?
231–240 of 323 posts
Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?
#232The article does smell a bit like "tech can fix everything" when the problem with WebMD and others is not that they are full of ads or SEO optimisation.
The simple truth is that medical care is more complex than just "headache = paracetomol". Some drugs don't work on some people, others might be more effective but more expensive. Some are not compatible with e.g. pregnancy or other drugs you might be taken.
As for symptom identification, many of us have seen "House MD" and should know that pain + swelling could be any of about 1000 conditions. This is why we still need Doctors.
Sure, us "clever" types might be able to self-diagnose 90% of the time but we need the doctor who can see the pale skin, the yellow eyes, who asks about recent changes in lifestyle or health, things that we could easily miss.
Now if you could encapsulate all of that on WebMD....
Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anyone who wants attention is motivated to do SEO. Should engines downrank every site that has good SEO? That is, downrank every site that ranks highly? They already look at things like clickthroughand dwell time and bounce back. If enough people dislike Example.com enough to avoid clicking on it or come back to search after visiting it, the engine learns that it is a bad result. Maybe the problem is that most people…
No, they key is to differentiate SEO'd pages with useful content from SEO'd pages with useless content. This is a game as old as search engines. In 2005, it meant filtering out sites that were just lists of keywords, not coherent sentences and paragraphs. It meant for giving extra points to articles with structure, such as header tags and paragraphs, as opposed to just blobs of text. It meant using PageRank to organi…
This seems like a good fit for a ! solution like duckduckgo. !gov !universities These may already exist.
Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
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'…
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.
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Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The outcome? The highest quality site for information on supplements, vitamins, etc available on the Internet. This just sounds like snake oil advertising but with the privilege of paying to see it.
There are in fact a lot of supplements that are effective. Magnesium for heart issues, Calcium for bone density, creatine for weight lifting. There are also a lot of supplements that do nothing. The "snake oil". Examine exists so that you can use studies to determine which is which.
Snake oil per se is an analogue of fish oil, effective. It's use as a pejorative term dates to false advertising of petroleum as actual snake oil in the 19th century. The biggest problem was it wasn't well processed at the time, and was not really edible like petroleum derivatives can now be made to be.
And I generally don't take it at face value, I accept it as a glitch in English.
Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?
#236the best site would be a single page that says "talk to your doctor" vertically and horizontally aligned in a large font. If you want to read about how not using a certain brand of band-aids means your child is destined to become a serial killer then research medical information online. For medical information the Internet is the last place i go.
Not when a large percentage of Americans can’t afford a visit to their doctor, that disclaimer is only going to be ignored and users will look elsewhere.
Yeah there's a highly restrictive quota, your affording medicine comes at other Americans's expense. Cornered market.
Now if you were to travel to South America or in particular to Cuba that would not restrict health care access to other Americans. On the contrary. They basically all speak English in Chile, accent yeah just deal with it, better than a 50-minute wait for a 6-minute appointment meant to last 20 minutes.
Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd make the claim (without any real data), that the NHS has _such_ institutional power in the UK that it goes a long way to transcend any SEO shortfall it may have.
The NHS definitely does rank highly in the UK. Not sure if it ranks above web md, but they’re usually both in the top 5 results if they have a relevant page.
It pretty much always ranks above WebMD in the UK. WebMD has a very low rank for me. Mayo Clinic is the site that I normally see tussling for the top spot with the NHS. Some examples randomly plucked from my brain:
1. Vitiligo: NHS: 1, Mayo Clinic: 2, WebMD: 7
2. Bronchiolitis: NHS 1, Mayo Clinic 2, WebMD: 9 (on the second page!)
3. Appendicitis: NHS 1, Mayo Clinic 2, WebMD: 3
4. Myopia: Mayo Clinic 1, WebMD 2, NHS: 3
5. Gastroenteritis: NHS Inform (never seen this before?) 1, WebMD: 2, Mayo Clinic 3, NHS: 4
6. Hodgkin's disease: Mayo Clinic 1, NHS: 2, WebMD: 5
Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?
#238A 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…
A fairly straightforward answer is that the government's goals are not necessarily aligned with your own. You, presumably, care very much about your own personal health. You also care about other people's health, but you really, really care about your own health, and probably don't want to die earlier than you need to.
The government, on the other hand, doesn't generally care about individuals, and is working on a statistical level. A good government wants the population overall to be in good health, and has a budget within which it must operate. It may make more sense for the government to ignore your rare disease if detection/treatment is expensive, and that money can be better used to save, say, 10 people with a more common disease.
Now, if the government was just providing health information, and individuals were on the hook for payment, this disconnect wouldn't really exist. But if the government is also providing the healthcare services "for free" to individuals, then there is an incentive to downplay testing for rare or expensive to treat diseases due to the cost/benefit ratio.
Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?
#239Sure 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 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.
Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tragedy of the Commons. We all could use easily accessible, accurate and unbiased medical information, but most people can't or won't pay a website to procure and publish such content, especially when they don't really know if they can trust the site! It's rather circular. If only there were some association of all people, some kind of organization that included all members of the public, which could collect a nomina…
The existence and success of Wikipedia (and other similar sites) easily counters this notion of needing consumer propensity to pay for a knowledge repository. Sure, reliability and accuracy of the information may be put into question, but that would have been a concern either way even if it were a paid service.
People are not encouraged to make personal health decisions by Wikipedia.