Better WebMd already exists. https://www.cochrane.org/
What would a “good” WebMD look like?
41–50 of 323 posts
Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?
#42Compare WebMD to examine.com The difference? You pay for examine.com. The outcome? The highest quality site for information on supplements, vitamins, etc available on the Internet. WebMD just needs to be good enough for Google.
> The difference? You pay for examine.com.
Shouldn’t it be "You can pay"? Because I get all the information I need on Examine for free (and checking their paid offering, they seem to have changed from "professionals" to "laypeople" as their target audience, with everything being a guide and behind a clearer interface).
Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?
#43A 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.
Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?
#44Earlier 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.
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.
Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?
#45A 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…
I also prefer information from the NHS even though I live in the US. Here medical information online is all about making money from ads and who knows what else they sell. There is actually little money to make from providing relevant information, unlike a national heath care system (which despite its terrible current state politically in the UK, where it seems they want to move to the US model) has an incentive to pr…
The US government also provides healthcare info at cdc.gov, nih.gov, health.gov, or USA.gov/health.
Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?
#46Compare WebMD to examine.com The difference? You pay for examine.com. The outcome? The highest quality site for information on supplements, vitamins, etc available on the Internet. WebMD just needs to be good enough for Google.
> 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.
Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?
#47How does the article and comment section not have one mention of liability?
No one gives clear medical descriptions without 10 miles of caveats that water the information down completely. This is because no one wants to be sued for bad medical advice.
Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?
#48[deleted]
Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?
#49Unpopular 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…
As a doctor I have a brief moment of sympathy with this idea - I've seen far too many patients badly mislead by "Dr Google" - but ultimately I think it is important to provide clear, helpful, and well-targeted health information online for the layperson.
Of course there's no incentive for WebMD to do this, they just want clicks on ads. But in Australia our governments publish a fair bit of helpful health information online, and I do often print some of it out for my patients when they go home. Sometimes it's not enough in itself, but it's great for a "you've got X, here's some info about it" situation.
UpToDate is the medical-grade, actually helpful, for professionals only, quite expensive "Wikipedia for Medicine", I use it every day, among a few other resources. But it's not something you can just open up and use - it's very much designed to be used by people with the right background knowledge - you need to know how to find what you want, and you need to know how to use what you find.
Re: What would a “good” WebMD look like?
#50WebMD 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.