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Meet Web Hypochondriacs
prostoalex writes "When Jerome K. Jerome in 1889 described going to the British Museum to read medical encyclopedia and subsequently finding symptoms of almost all diseases in his body, he didn't realize the problem would exacerbate more than a century later. Web hypochondriacs are calling up doctors with requests for prescriptions for all sorts of diseases, since they discovered some similar symptoms on the Web. Wall Street Journal quotes a doctor: 'My impression is that people believe more of what they read than what I tell them. It seems that traditional Western medicine based on scientific evidence is less and less trusted by the general public. Meanwhile, some dubious theory from the Internet will be swallowed hook, line and sinker nine times out of 10.' "
That sounds EXACTLY like the problem *I* have!!!!
I hope there's a cure...
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I have MSBlaster! And Slammer! No, you got to believe me. They keep attempt to spread from within me. It's very annoying and has cost me three friends already -- I can't loose many more! And this Norton Anti-Virus doesn't seem to be working. I don't even know where to put the CD!
Free of Flash! Free of Flash!
I think the web is making everyone out to gullable. We all need to remember that there is a lot of FALSE information on the web. I think this applies to other things other than medicine. The web is giving a false sense of knowlege.
2000 BC: Here, take this root.
1000 AD: That root is for a heathen. Here, say this prayer.
1850 AD: That prayer is superstition. Here, drink this potion.
1940 AD: That potion is snake oil. Here, swallow this pill.
1985 AD: That pill is ineffective. Here take this antibiotic.
2000 AD: That antibiotic is artificial. Here, eat this root.
2005 AD: That root works! Read about it on my blog!
I am a web hypochondriac...based on what I have read anyway. Who cares what the doc says.
I'd post a longer comment but my RSI is playing up.
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
Web hypochondriacs are calling up doctors with requests for prescriptions for all sorts of diseases
I've got some e-mails about getting their pills if the doctor won't prescribe it.
The prescriptions in real life getting from an actual doctor usually cost a lot, and most normal diseases, admittedly, are not 'urgent' by many people standard. If they can save some money, many are willing to try something they never heard of. Hey, worst is that they don't work and they will have to see a real doctor.
Or... in the modern version of the question:
Which came first - the "web hypochondriac" who thought that he was suffering from impotence, having a small p---s, and an unsatisfied love life or the online Viagra pharmacy (in Canada, of all places)?
My ex, and her sister, are both like this. They'll take the wildest treatments for various things instead of just riding out a cold, or putting a bandaid on a cut. And, dont get them started on anything like surgery or radiation treatment, no.
AIEEEEEEEEE
The fact is, people are going to use the web when they are ill to look for information about the illness. The best thing to do is to provide reliable data, so they don't end up diagnosing themselves based on information they found on a blog. The user could enter symptoms, and a list of possibilities could be listed (as well as numerous messages telling them to go see a doctor). It would be similar to the program Lisa uses to diagnose Homer and Bart as lepers.
Voice your opinion!
I know, I know, they're all quack theories... but what about this one. I mean, just look at this site and all it's pictoral evidence.
Duct Tape, the savoir of mankind, can do anything it puts its mind to. First and foremost, it can cure plantar warts! Hooray.
--
RumorsDaily
I got all excited when I saw the title and thought ... Wow! People get spyware just by convincing themselves it's there! Oh well. **Returns to Python**
I am Spartacus
It's nice to have the information researchable, so that you can get more information than what your doctor tells you. I've recently started suffering from eczema outbreaks, followed by a couple of nasty infections over the past year. I've seen several GPs, a couple of dermatologists, and an infectious disease specialist for the infection that keeps popping up all over my legs. Aside from the antibiotics, the things I've read about eczema on the web have helped me more than the vague advice given by the family doctors and dermatologists.
"There is an interesting phenomenon that occurs amongst medical students, called Interns' Disease: when they are studying certain aspects of health, they become more aware of their own health."
WebMD is the worst thing to come along for Hypocondriacs since pneumoconiosis and other sesquipadelian afflictions.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
Wall Street Journal quotes a doctor: 'My impression is that people believe more of what they read than what I tell them...
Of course! Because you're telling them things like "Stop smoking, don't drink so much, cut down the fat, get some excersize, brush your teeth and watch your diet". Who the hell wants to hear that? Websites aren't so much interested in your health as they are in getting ad impresions, so they probably aren't going to preach.
On the internet no one knows you're a fat lazy bastard with bad habits. [but if I were a betting man, that's where I'd put my money]
IANAD, but I think if you find yourself reloading slashdot every five minutes whilst trying to accomplish real work, you probably should consider the possibility of attention deficit disorder.
My wife will get some symptom, and then scour books and the web for indications of possible diagnosis. I found it funny after a while, but the first couple of times she declared that she had cancer or MS was quite worrying.
The funniest thing is that my wife is a doctor.
Any fool can talk, but it takes a wise man to listen.
Doctors (their mistakes) are the 3rd leading cause of death in the USA.
- Leading-Cause-of-Death-in-the-US.htm
http://www.healingdaily.com/Doctors-Are-The-Third
This article is a little extreme. Almost half are due to unforseeable drug effects. But still, a good reason to doubt your doctor.
FreeBSD: The Power to Serve!
I was rather expecting the computer user variant of hypochondry: people thinking the strangest (and utter most impossible things) are wrong with their pc
:)
:D)
i've heard stories about people claiming they had virusses (yes, plurar even ^^) in their cd-rom drive, monitor, anything you name plugged in, or probably even remotely related to their pc
i would love to see some statistics on that, i think it's happening more frequent every day (and i'd love to see the reactions of helpdesk employees when they got such people on the line
It's probably because almost all of the research is funded by corporations that make themselves sound good. I mean, I'd rather trust someone who I didn't know, but I considered a *regular guy* instead of a paid researcher who told what to find. I mean, word of mouth advertising versus reading magazine advertisements. I'd believe word of mouth more.
Luke
----
Don't let your family be ignorant any more, send them to ChristianNerds.com (The Free Online Computer Encyclopedia)
But to tell you the truth I'm not impressed with US doctors, or at least the way they go about their business.
I can only speak from my personal experience, but for four years I've been experiencing terrible coughing fits, accompanied by heavy drainage from both nose and lungs and swollen eyelids. I went from doctor to doctor in search of a diagnosis... "Oh, it's the flu, here are some antibiotics" or "It's probably bronchitis, here are antibiotics."
Until finally, I managed to get to an allergy specialist (at my request, mind you) who diagnosed me with seasonal allergies.
So yes, if it takes the professionals 4 years to diagnose me with allergies and give me the correct prescription, then yeah, I'm gonna look to other sources to help me diagnose myself...
if(read) { //true
}
I think I have aspergers because I read about it on /.
The original: http://www.bash.org/?492775
I think it's important to look at the flip side, too. Doctors who are in their 50's learned medicine 30 years ago, and often haven't kept up to date on all the latest medical findings. For example, the advice I receive from my doctor for certain common illnesses is a bit outdated, and somewhat dangerous.
we actually have a jumpy user who calls/emails every time she hears about a new virus, gets an error message, sneezes, etc. we haven't heard much from her since upgrading her to xp. either everything is working or she's dead.
paranoid + non-technical = headache.
Likewise for doctors ...
Now that doctors have the internet to publish their "findings" (while still being under the influence of lobby by drug companies) - they too are over perscribing or over diagnosing - especially when it comes to rather common things.
One example is HPV - which is a sexually transmitted disease. 90% of the population has symptoms. Having similar symptoms is NOT actually having a disease.
HPV is actually just a predisposition to cervical cancer or prostate cancer and it hasn't been proven that it is actually an STD.
A hypochondriac friend of mine went to get a annual pap smear and doctor check up and told her she had HPV - after doing research - I was able to see how and why doctors over-perscribe this ( hint: money / hint 2: research grants )
I would bet if you go to the doctor and get a thorough check up, YOU will be diagnosed as having HPV - try it out!
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
I prefer to be informed and in total control. As far as I'm concerned, I should be able to walk into a drug store and purchase anything I want without a presciption, just like they do in many many parts of the world. Doctors look down on patients who act as if they are in control of their own bodies. How dare they think that way! Doctors have all kinds of non-medical relationships with businesses and get biased towards them, but they look down upon people who want to take control of their own bodies and are willing to suffer the consequences of their own actions. Decades of the nanny state make this seem crazy. Americans in control of their own bodies is a novel idea these days.
Chalking it up to price is a very limited view of the problem. I know, my wife has this exact problem, to the point where I've had to threaten to block certain websites at the firewall. It has nothing to do with price. The problem that I see is the "warnings" on the internet are all vaguely worded enough to apply to almost any symptoms you have.
Her problem is she has a couple of very real health problems that require her to take some serious drugs with some nasty side effects. However, she has a nasty habit of thinking every new side effect is a new problem and looking up what it could be on the internet and thinking that's her problem.
Never confuse volume with power.
Meanwhile, some dubious theory from the Internet will be swallowed hook, line and sinker nine times out of 10.
While the statement looks to be true on surface, a friend of mine had a life changing experience after reading a theory.
He played basketball in college and had some knee problems that eventually prohibited him from continuing to play. He was getting physiotherapy done but it was only a temporary relief. The doctors that he went to basically said that he might have to live with that. So, out of all desperation, he turned to Google and started digging up details based on his symptoms. And after a while, he took his research to a few doctors. One of them actually took initiative saying that it was an area that he had not previously explored. So, the doctor did some study and possibly discussed it with experts in the field. My friend had an operation done 3-4 years ago and he is as good as he used to be before the problem.
So, 9 out of 10 might be bogus but still if you have nowhere else to go, that remaining 1 out of 10 might help.
Free XBox, PS2
I agree. I have many relatives who are online but not really technology savvy. Not a month goes by that I do not get CC'ed on some ridiculous email. I always go look it up on Snopes and do a reply to all with a link the Snopes article discrediting it. The thing that really gets me though, is a couple of times a year I will get one of these from someone who knows better. When I call them on it, I usually get the same response, "Well I figured better safe than sorry." Some how they just do not understand that by forwarding unsubstantiated false information they are perpetuating the problem.
Insert Generic Sig Here:
I won't go to the doctor partly because they are god damn retarded enough to give someone who has a viral infection an anti-biotic. The side effects to the medication the prescribe is rarely told to you(I was on one for a year that the side effect was kidney failure, yay).
No time to post...I'll probably be dead before hitting the submit....
...by my doctor, at least.
I went to him thinking I had angina. At 28. The symptoms: chest pain and dizziness. He told me I had pulled a chest muscle and had a wicked inner ear infection. And he told me I wasn't allowed to go look up my symptoms on-line anymore. And I agreed with him...any time I'd look at a medical site I'd get more and more nervous. Now that I don't I feel much better.
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
Self-diagnosing makes people feel more in control of their health. People perceive doctors as authority figures who take control away from the patients. People do not perceive sources they find on their own as controlling (even though many of the sources do have their own agendas) so they adopt the source's explanation rather than the doctors.
The desire to feel in control is such a powerful drive that people will trade concrete benefits like money or expert advice for the mere illusion of control.
Long long ago, I was assigned a school project- each person had to research a specific type of cancer. I decided to look into pancreatic cancer, and started looking through books, etc.. I went to speak with my doctor about it, and he was very hesitant to tell me anything. The problem with pancreatic cancer is 1) it is almost 100% fatal, 2) the initial symptoms are the types of things you experience regularly. Many people, when learning all of the symptoms, etc, find those in themselves, and automatically think the worst. Working a great deal with probablity now, I understand how this happens- people tend to assume that the probability of a high consequence, low occurance risk is much higher than it really is (look at post 9/11 United States- people tend to over estimate the risk). So, when the info is out there, there will be those that over estimate the risk, see symptoms, and diagnose themselves with all kinds of crazy illnesses.
....and pharmaseutical companies are telling us every commercial break that things like heartburn, insomnia, and arthritis are threats to our very lives.
This was funny (and no, I wasn't the poster.) The mods here are fucktards.
Having an aunt who died of Multiple Sclerosis constantly triggers a bit of anxiety in me every time I have a muscle spasm. I figured out long ago that I can't browse WebMD or read descriptions of MS anymore, because it gets me overly concerned and anxious.
But reading web sites and articles about hypochondria, especially with the advent of tons of medical information at your fingertips, has helped me.
The best quote I saw online about it was from a general practitioner, who had experience with patients coming in concerned with a self-diagnosis. He said "People are always worried that their symptoms resemble a bad disease or disorder. But what many people forget is that everyone has symptoms. It's just a part of life."
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
The problem is that dyslexic doctors think they are dog.
I'm not sure what the point is. Sure, people read stuff and feel like they have it. The same thing has been happening to doctors for decades. Regular people too -- only in small batches. Now that there is more stuff for people to read, there is more stuff to believe. Assuming that doctors aren't some highly evolved lifeform from the planet Xerox, I think people will get along just fine, just like the docs.
After all, isn't this really about education? I mean, do you really fight something like smoking by making it illegal, moaning about how stupid people are to buy into the "cool factor", or by education? Seems to me that as long as you have an "Urban Legends" site, you teach somebody to go there and boom! No more email hoaxes. Same for medicine, right? We just need to have authoritative sources and tell people about them. Interestingly enough, this is also a problem of the MSM, which tends to exaggerate things in order to get ratings. People buy into the "panick of the week" mentality.
Shuttlecraft For Sale, Buy Today!
I can't really empathize with doctors on this one. The last 4 or 5 times I've seen a doctor over probably the past 10 years, they have completely kept me in the dark with what's been wrong. I come in with congestion, or a cough, or a sore throat, and the result is always the same, they give me a new antibiotic, an inhaler, and some pseudophedrine.
I end up going to web md or some other website to do research and deduce what my symptoms point to. It seems like doctors no longer take the time to assess symptoms and determine what is actually wrong, they just dispense a few prescriptions, sign some paperwork, and send the patient on their way. It's not wonder that people want to get more info than what the MD profession is offering.
I think this occurs because people are suckers for anecdotal evidence. They are more likely to believe a story of some patent who was cured by drinking their own urine (or something like that) then a scientific study. Plus studies are hard to understand where as anecdotes are easy to understand. There also seems to be alot of conspiricy theories surrounding Drug companies and the "treatment" industry vs a "cure" industry.
I have been suffering with some pretty fucking bad digestion problems all my life. I have the hershey squirts alot and real bad cramps in my stomach. I went to the gastrointestinal doctor here in my home town for a endoscopy and colonoscopy. He diagnosed me with IBS syndrome and sent me on my marry way saying it was just a nervous stomach. After suffering for 4 more years of that crap I decided to try and figure out what the hell was wrong with me. I googled my symptoms and found my symptoms closely related to Celiacs Disease...Almost identical in everyway to the people with Celiacs of what they described. I went to another doctor the week after reading the Celiacs website and was diagnosed after another biopsy as having Celiacs. Only after using the web to help me find out my symptoms was I actually diagnosed properly. Google saved my bowels from a lifelong of shitting and pain :/
I didn't RTFA, but...
I'm a poor college student with no health insurance and not a lot of financial help. If I can find a solution to a problem that cuts the doctor out, it can be a wallet-saver.
The last two medical problems I have had, I easily identified with a little bit of web-searching. Neither of these problems had simple solutions (one required surgery, the other a prescription), so I didn't hit the jackpot or anything. But I saved both the doctor and myself time by showing up at the office and saying "I think this is my problem, I need you to verify it and recommend a surgeon/write a prescription."
With the vast amount of information at our disposal, it is easy to forget that *anyone* can put something on the internet. I am quite guilty of that myself. If something looks professional, it is easy to assume that it is true. I won't trust information from a website that looks poorly thrown together or is riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. But if the person displays competence and confidence, I tend to be pretty trusting. And if I can trust these sources and save myself a trip (READ: $$) to a doctor or a prescription, I might as well.
I certainly don't think people should be foolish enough to trust any crazy remedy they come across on The Internets, though. People just need to display a little common sense.
-KD
to all my medical problems arrive by the hundreds in my inbox every day!
Does this mean that I'm not really addicted to pr0n? *phew*
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
With the carefull review of our dear editors and the amazing quality of stories submited I might simply stop seeing a doctor altogether.
And for the hypochondriacs out there, all the dupes will make sure we don't miss one single disease we might have.
I've got McAfee scanning me right now...
This is just another varient on Medical Student Syndrome.
In psychology it's so bad, due to the nature of people and the subject, that every Abnormal Psychology book I've seen, and the class I took, starts with a warning abouth the syndrome; most psychological disorders are defined in rather normal terms, and at any moment, most of us have at least one symptom that shows up in the DSM. It's the confluence of multiple symptoms (usually) that persist and cause problems for the person that defines a true problem, but if you're not paying attention to those caveats (or they don't reassure you)...
Medical Student Syndrome isn't going to kill you, but it can cause some stress at a time in your life when you really don't need it. (No joke.)
I know a lot of people that become "instant experts" on a wide variety of subjects, all because they googled something, went to a few different sites that gave a little detail into something, and they finish out the thought with their own ideas.
A good example is a good freind of mine, who thinks he's the next Einstein, because he reads some science-related site, that explains some of the laws of physics on an easy-to-understand level.
Besides, if someone is a Hypochondriac, then something's wrong with them.---Sorry I just had to ;)
Time is comparison of movement to other movement.
Hyponchondriac is nothing. Alternativ medicine is more dangerous in my eye : people really ill getting alternative treatment and dying. And the web make for an exponential propagation of those despite that they are if not all, mostly junk.
Just have a look at all those totally supersticious claim and alternative medicine : homeopathy, colorotherapy, herbotherapy, crytsllotherapy, fengshui... Indeed we are in a demon haunted world.
I think education is the only answer, but how can you educate people when part of them learn that ID/creationism must be thaught in their class with the same footing than evolutionism, people misappropriate the definition of a theory in science, downright lie or misuse term they do not understand to support their own unscientific pet peeve, or even politic is used to support religious activity, even if there is a separation of church and state, downright disrespect, to not say hate, of science in all its form inclusive medicine.
For all wanting to learn a bit and start fighting against obscurantism I recommend this : James Randi Education Fundation (JREF I think it is called).
I think before solving hyponcondiacism we have to solve the problem of people believing in all sort of crap, and teach the tenet of the scientific method, or even if it is too much, at least teach back respect of science !!!
Frankly in comparison hyponchondriacism is nothing. It does not propagate as much damage...
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I'm quite a hypochondriac myself. My doctor told me a few years ago that I had General Anxiety Disorder. When I told my girlfriend at the time she asked me "How do you feel about having G.A.D.?"
I responded, "Quite frankly it makes me a little nervous."
Why is this?
Why do people fall for 419 Scams? Why do people *let* spyware onto their machines? Why do people let the government walk over their rights in the name of freedom? Why do people believe the universe is only 6,000 years old? Why do people refuse to learn the basic workings of the technology they use every day of their lives?
It's not because they're stupid. Well, ok, many of them are. but many are not. Why do they do/think these stupid things?
Because they are taught to do this.
They are taught that science is "hard" and "mysterious"; that it's ok to "not get that hard sceince stuff". They are taught to accept what they're told, without being taught how to distinguish reliable sources of information from the scams.
They are taught that critical reasoning is unnecessary, but they are now given virtually free access to vast amounts of unregulated information that requires critical reasoning to correctly process.
Of course, the government will decide to regulate the information, in the "interest" of the "comman person" who doesn't have enough critical reasoning to realize this is a terrible idea.
C'est la vie.
multifariam.net -- yet another nerd blog
...monkey do.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Some treatment standards lag behind reality. Diabetics, for example, are coming to realize the benefits of tight blood glucose control in avoiding the long-term complications of the disease. Doctors, on average, are *way* behind the curve on this issue. If you go online and read up on the disease (one of the best mailing lists maintains a semi-official motto of "My body, my science project") enough, you may conclude you want to start shooting insulin *now* instead of a few years from now when you absolutely must. You may decide that the potential benefits (keeping your eyesight and your feet, for example) outweigh the (literal) pain of starting injecting yourself a few years earlier than your physician would direct.
But what happens when you go to an average general practitioner and say you want to start giving yourself (in his view) a bunch of premature and unnecessary injections? He'll typically think you're a crazy hypochondriac and treat you to a dose of head-patting condescension. At that point, if you're smart, you find an endocrinologist whose education didn't stop a decade ago, get the insulin, and start using it. Did you *have* to? Probably not. Are you *sure* this staved off complications? Again, probably not. But was it a reasonable judgement call to make and was it, ultimately, your responsibility to take charge of your own treatment regimen? Damn right it was.
Want another example? It's been long established that some of the vaccinations routinely administered to children in the U.S. are for conditions for which there is, practically speaking, *no* risk. Those children are more at risk from that subset of vaccinations than they are from the diseases. So what happens when parents read up on vaccinations and make an informed decision to subject their child to less than the full panoply of typically-administered injections? Their pediatricians treat them like idiots or worse, sometimes firing their own patients for not towing the line and doing, without question, whatever the doctor orders.
Too many doctors treat educated patients as if they were hypochondriacs. That's unwarranted and sad. They've brought the problem on themselves with their attitudes. The 'net didn't create the problem. Doctors did.
Depo Provera is one of those drugs that doctors tend to suggest that does more harm than good. It's a birth control shot but it has some very nasty side effects (which range from person to person of course). However, regardless if a doctor would recommend it, I would not simply because I knew someone who used it and that person ended up gaining 15lbs (from 110 to 135), and ended up being on her period 24/7 (very light) for MONTHS. Doctors should research their stuff as well, and not just trust a pharmaceutical company that shoves money down their throats.
I usually don't go to see a doctor until things are getting dire - my typical thought is "Oh, I'll feel better tomorrow or next week". Part of that is due to the state of Health Care in the US - waiting weeks or months to get a doctors apointment (yes, it happens here too not just in countries with socialized medicine - the difference being if I "Fake" being sicker on the phone I MIGHT get an earlier appointment), high copays and deductibles, high cost of Rx, etc. Sometimes seeing the doctor seems more trouble than it's worth! Of course for those times when you really need mecical treatment, you have to bite the bullet and go.
After watching House (Tues, 9pm, Fox) a few times, I have been known to go to WebMD to look up diseases. The issue here is that many serious or fatal diseases have very common symptoms, and a less than discerning reader will think a pimple is cancer or a bug bite means they have three months to live.
A scare story on the news, a recommendation by so-called 'experts' to give self-exams for lumps or an ad campaign by big pharma can also contribute to public overreaction. I don't think doctors mind a surge in business, albeit being wasteful, as much as the public's lack of confidence in their diagnosis. I guess, the point is "just because you read it on the Internet, it doesn't make you an M.D."
For demolishing the concept of causality. Thank you, Mr. Kant, for demolishing the concept of reason.
As you irrational people sow, so shall you reap.
When you look around and see that your socialized healthcare has destroyed medicine, that your empty philosophy has destroyed philosophy, that your bankrupt economic system has destroyed your means of survival, when your ethics have destroyed the last of the good and the just, what will you do then?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
What? You mean I would prefer looking at stuff for 15 minutes, eating something natural, and get the placebo effect instead of waiting 4 hours for a "diagnostic", paying 50$ for "medecin" and getting squat for it?
I don't get why doctor have to go to the university for 7 years. I think that by the time they get out, they forgot the basics.
Everytime I go to the doctor I end up with a wasted afternoon, less money, and ussually more symptoms from the medecine. (Dizziness, dry mouth and stuff)
God forbid I would try to take care of myself!
I don't think it's just the web that's making people out to be fools lately. Personally, I think the root of it is peoples' growing desire for instant gratification. I think most people would rather not admit that they have the flu and that they'll feel miserable for two weeks until they get over it. Most of people I've met would rather look up symptoms on the net and find some condition that tells them they would only need to take 150mg of $foo for two days and be done that much quicker. The wealth of misinformation on the internet is a definate player in this field, but I think the root of the problem stems from the desire for a quick fix.
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
Yes, they want research grants for HPV, because it's still poorly understood. But it's not a false diagnosis. If they see "symptoms" of HPV, they do a DNA test for it, which is more accurate than the pap smear test itself, which checks for cell abnormalities, visually.
There are many strains of HPV. High Risk strains cause cervical cancer, and possibly prostate cancer too. They're STD-only, not like some other HPV strains. If the DNA test is positive, you're at risk... because if you don't have high risk HPV, there's slim to no chance of cervical cancer.
DNA testing for a virus is still somewhat difficult. But the idea is to prevent cervical cancer from growing and killing you, when it's easily identified.
And remember, just because lots of people have HPV doesn't mean it's acceptable to pass it on. Just in the past 2 years, people have started to realize that cervical cancer is caused by a viral STD.
It's one of the first cancers to be directly linked to a virus. I don't think it's imprudent to identify it in women. (Currently, there's no High Risk HPV test for men)
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
I call bullshit. This is exactly the kind of shit that people believe. But this is a perfect example of bad information on the web that people are likely to believe. As with *anything*, you need to look at the sources. I hope that you put this link up as a joke, because it's funny as hell.
To a certain extent it is, because now and then it uses the scientific method but it is way behind hard sciences such as physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology or geology.
The main problem is that the main objective of medicine is not aquiring knowlewdge but healing people and making money in the process. For this reason medicine can be classified as a human activity which is a profession and a business rather than a science.
Another problem with medicine as a science is that, although much older than other sciences, it is less advanced. Medical predictions are usually qualitative, not quantiative and have not reached the accuracy of the predictions made by hard sciences. For example think about the accuracy of the predictions made by planetary astronomy! Medicine is centuries, maybe millenia away from that!
I am a theoretical physicist and usually dont think of medicine as a science but more like a repair business, similar to plumbing or auto repair. In a way physicians are not that different from tribal healers from primitive societies, they both fulfill the same social functions. Actually in some African countries with a shortage of Western style physicians, both tribal healers and medical doctors are members of the same professional associations.
One of the many reasons I hate the internet. People need to go back to using it only for it's intended purpose. Downloading music/movies/porn!
I like goo.
I saw it on the TV, so it has to be true, Now it's: nIt was on the internet, so it's got to be true! Ah, societal Darwinism
/. is not to be used by individuals with high blood pressure or a history of heart attacks
Well, the simple reason is that people don't trust their physicians anymore. Back in the Elder Days(tm) of Marcus Welby and so on, doctors took an interest in the health of their patients. A relationship was built over time. Finally, when the doc said, "You know, you need to go in and have surgery for this", a patient would do so without thinking twice because of the relationship and the longstanding trust between them.
Now, due to the way that doctors have to practice medicine (if they don't want to lose their shirts), they don't have a choice. 15 minutes in and out. No time to get to know their patients, no time to listen to the little old lady that just needs someone to talk to, no time to do anything but write a prescription and go on to the next patient. Now, when a doctor says, "That article on the internet is full of crap, you need surgery," people ask, "Why should I trust you? I don't know you."
If that doctor REALLY wants to know why people would believe an apocryphal story on the internet rather than him, he needs to look at the type of medicine he's practicing.
Note: This is not to blame him. Generally, with the reimbursement rates he's getting from the insurance plans with which he is signed, he is very limited in the amount of time he can spend with a patient. But the point remains: Speaking for myself, if someone wants to practice medicine on me, I have to trust them first. They've got lots of patients, but I only have one body. And the piece of paper on the wall saying M.D. only goes so far in building that trust.
Karma: Chameleon - mostly influenced by bad '80s New Wave music
"Patients are asked to not discuss or compare symptoms in the waiting room. It confuses the doctors."
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
Is it because they don't know your name without first looking on your chart?
Am I supposed to be impressed when they spend less than 30 seconds on a diagnosis, and then run off to see their next patient? I suppose this allows them to see some HMO dictated requisite number of patients in a given day.
The problem with the doctors of today is the same as the problem with programmers in the mid 90's, the field is loaded with hacks looking for money. When you find someone who's in it for the love of it, you've hit the jackpot.
and she gets patients constantly doing this. I didn't even know until I was watching the news with her. The reporter said "Always check the internet to make sure you're getting the best care possible" and my mom just got pissed. She started talking about all these patients coming in with self-diagnosis and demanding that she do something about it, which usually means "Give me medicine you damn quack!"
And so she has to go into pacification mode, trying to reason with the patient that he/she doesn't have lymphoma ( chills, swelling of the lymph nodes, fever, night sweats, unexplained weight loss, lack of energy, itching) but the normal, average cold virus.
My Father, 54, pays almost $400 a month for medical insurance with a $5,000.00 deductable.
My Mother, 50 and a government employee, pays in excess of $500 per month for medical insurance.
While my Mother has had extensive medical problems, my Father hasn't even had a cold in almost 20 years. Let alone been to the doctor for anything other then checkups and physicals.
Please, tell me why I should trust a medical system that costs more then the lease on my fucking BMW?
Insurance companies charge insane premiums because doctors and hospitals charge insane rates. Doctors and hospitals claim they charge insane rates because of malpractice suits, etc etc..
But it all boils down to one simple fact: In the United States medical care is overpriced.
My son was sick, in Rogers, Arkansas, and we waited FOUR HOURS in the emergency room for a TWO YEAR OLD CHILD to be cared for. Why? Because the doctors were all busy. With what? NO ONE ELSE WAS THERE FOR FOUR HOURS! How much did that cost? $800. $800 to sit there waiting for four hours to get 20 minutes with a doctor.
More simply put: People don't trust you because you don't DESERVE to be trusted.
Here's a fancy example of Doctors being the wonderful men that they are: When I was sixteen I was in a car accident. My back was broke in three places. It took me NINE MONTHS to find a doctor who would treat me. Multiple times I was told by doctors that they do not see patients whos injuries are the subject of current litigation. (IE because I was suing the woman who hit me going in excess of 100mph I was going to be refused medical treatment)
I have no respect for Doctors. I think almost all of them are cowards, liars, and theives. It's no wonder why people have a hard time accepting a Doctors word for truth -- as all to often the Doctor is wrong; though no doubt I have yet to meet a Doctor who doesn't have a holier than thou "I can't be wrong I'm better than everyone else" attitude.
In my opinion, Doctors do nothing but steal from the lower classes in a large orchestrated insurance scam. Doctors scam the insurance companies, insurance companies scam the middle and lower classes.
Illegal immigrants all get free medical treatment and we all pay for it with higher taxes.
It's just FUN ALL AROUND!
The medical community; doctors, drug companies, HMOs, hospitals, researchers, etc., are also at fault here.
Despite the characterisation as "traditional Western medicine based on scientific evidence", a lot of the modern medical community act like spoiled, petty tyrants and opportunists. Many of them are no more 'scientists' than the hippie herbalist in the next building. Western medicine has wasted the currency of trust they had in the 1950 and 1960s.
Bad doctors expect to be treated as gods, refuse to justify their decisions or allow them to be independently reviewed. They expect other doctors to keep their mouths shut when they are caught flagrantly screwing up, and justify stupid decisions resulting in fatalities as "consistent with current medical practice." And most doctors, even the best, -do- protect them.
HMOs treat people like cattle and no longer give the -good- doctors time to talk with their patients. They don't know their patients -names- half the time, let alone the details of their conditions.
Drug companies release inadequately tested drugs only approved for -one- condition, then market it for everything under the sun...until they need to recall the drug because of very public fatalities or debilitating side effects. And doctors collude with them, in return perks. They aren't knowingly recommending a -bad- treatment. They're just recommending it on information they ought to know is inadequate.
Researchers, in the push to "publish or perish", spin their results to indicate much more certainty than is justified...then other studies come out saying, "Oops; we were wrong. This earlier recommendation could actually kill you. Sorry, although we never actually -told- you to do this; we just printed studies showing how amazing it was. We're not culpable."
Sure, people look stuff up on the Internet. But -most- of them do it in order to get medical information that big business has made it almost impossible to get through traditional channels (the family doctor) and absolutely necessary to cope with the systematic -misinformation- of the drug companies and researchers.
It may seem like I don't like the medical community, but that's not true. I just wish the good professionals had found the cojones to take out the trash when they still could have.
Another one (here in the UK) has been where someone is told that there is nothing that can be done for some problem only for them to find out using the web that something can be done about it (usually in another country).
A good example is this story about a baby born with a deformed head who was wrongly told that nothing was wrong and to live with the deformity. Thankfully, in the next four months the baby will be fine.
Not that I'm suggesting that all doctors get it wrong but once in a while the web has been a life-saver.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
I have been a doctor for 5 years, and can confirm that this is accurate.
Sadly, sources for good medical information do exist --namely, medical journals -- but are not available to the general public.
The New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, etc...they all deny people access to the full text of their articles without a hefty subscription fee. The fee is so large that most doctors-in-training can't afford it, either.
Some journals have taken the encouraging step of opening up older articles -- usually 2 years old or older. This still isn't good enough.
I would like to see open full text access to all medical journals, but I think we should insist on it if the research or study being published was supported with taxpayer money.
It's a self correcting problem Mr. Darwin's Chainsaw of Natural Selection will weed out the really stupid.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Maybe it's because this fact based medical science has lost much of it's luster due to the pharmaceutical industry lying about test results and pushing their pills through psychiatrists and doctors.
I was seeing a psychiatrist a number of years ago when I was a teen, and they recommended I take a certain medication. The drug they wanted me to take was called risperidone, it has been known to cause *permanent* facial ticks and twitches. My mother and I decided that that was a risk that we didn't want to take. So the psychiatrist proceeded to argue with my mother about this for nearly 10 minutes, nearly reaching the level of yelling, insisting that this was the medication I should take. We walked out and never went back.
I've been on drugs that have made me fat, while they were supposed to help with depression. I've been on drugs that have made me flip out when they were supposed to help with anxiety. The general mantra in the field is that you keep trying stuff till you find something that works. It is basically a sham with regard to most of the psychiatric drugs.
Then there are the other, medical drugs. You've got Vioxx, which kills people, Zoloft which makes people kill people... and a whole lot of other I can't remember. Prescription drugs are the fourth leading cause of death in America.
So you think people are going to believe a system set up to reap your money and sedate your soul over some vitamins and herbs? The simple fact of the matter is that HMO, insurace companies, and the pharmaceutical industry have replaced fact based scientific medicine with corporate profits. It's not that I don't trust science, it's that I don't trust 'science' that comes from the pharmaceutical industry. They have a proven track record of lying, and killing people for profit. Once we get back sensible regulations on the industry to prevent this sort of stuff then public trust will be restored in science based medicine over crap they read online.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munchausen_syndrome
"Munchausen syndrome is a form of psychological disorder known as a factitious disorder (the term "Munchausen syndrome" is sometimes used, incorrectly, to refer to any form of factitious disorder). Sufferers mimic real diseases, presenting a great problem to themselves and their healthcare professionals. The disorder is named after a literary figure, Baron Munchausen, a real person who was portrayed in fiction as a famous teller of tall tales."
More and more I see patients who arrive at the office with information they printed off the web. It is becoming a problem. I end up spending half the appointment explaining why they don't have some bazaar disease. Strangely there are more than a few patients who will doubt your competence or motives if you disagree with whatever they read online. The medical community (myself included) are doing a terrible job of building relationships with our patients; so they turn to any quack with a slick web page. By the way, the author of the WSJ piece is right about the the people trolling for narcotics. They have disappeared from our office too. I also think most are now getting their drugs from various dubious internet operations.
Meanwhile, some dubious theory from the Internet will be swallowed hook, line and sinker nine times out of 10.'
Oh yeah, creation is real you know!
My doctor freely admits that since medical information became accessible to anyone on the web his patients are often better informed about their specific problems than he is. Patients only need to focus on their specifc issues and are often highly motivated. The doctor still has the benefit of wider knowledge and more experience.
I know that some doctors feel threatened by this but he actually likes it. He believes an open an cooperative approach can be beneficial for both doctors and patients.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
This is exactly the same problem Western Lawyers have suffered from for years. I give people good advice almost daily, and like Alice, they very seldom follow it. But tell them something is not an issue, and a hundred stories from the internet come wafting out.
"But what about this man?! I checked it out and it's legit!"
Like Doctors, lawyers were trusted until nationwide news started making an issue out of a few bad apples.
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
Not only that, but doctors don't listen to patients. Even if you arrive early, you have to wait for 30 minutes in a room by yourself. Then people other than doctors come in and do stuff, or check stuff, or take a sample of something. Then the doctor rolls in, looks at the chart, prescribes something, and asks "Do you have any questions?" as they are backing out of the room with no intention of participating in any kind of dialogue.
Doctors don't treat patients, they treat symptoms. If I think I can figure it out on my own, and it isn't anything too serious, I'll check the internet. So far it has worked out pretty well.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
To your sig, I think it goes:
Secant, tangent, cosine, sin, 3.14159!
She'd watch any show with a doctor on it and she'd develop whatever illness they were describing.
:-)
She blew her credibility and any sympathy factor right out of the water when she called her mother in a twist and wailed about having prostate cancer.
Hypochondria is a hoot sometimes.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
After all, the same sort of superstition/gullibility/tin-foil-hatism has large swaths of western Europe thinking that the CIA flew the planes in the World Trade Center (or the Israelis, etc. - take your pick), or that every resident of Kentucky suffering from sleep disorders is actually a repeat victim of alien kidnapping, or that dancing in a circle while wearing the correct outfit makes it rain. There are thousands of click-optimized web sites set up specifically to resonate with each and every crackpot world view. There was a time when we associated a total lack of any critical thinking skills with people living in small rural towns. But now it's the MTV-saturated, broadband-connected kids of wealthy suburbanites that are learning to never learn, and being spoon-fed a diet of irrational, feel-good, magical-thinking empty solutions to their problems. And since we live in a surplus-rich, leaning-socialist world, people don't really have to be connected with reality to still eat, have a roof over their heads, attract a similarly vapid mate and hatch out another brood of witless ninnies. And Google AdSense is complicit, I tell you!
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I still suffer from an oesophagus inflammation due to an antibiotic. I remember when it happened I was a bit puzzled, but I easily understood from the informative sheet in the medicine box that it could have been the case. Nevertheless, symptoms were somehow strange (sensation of foreign body in the throat, cough, difficulties in swallowing).
I went to the emergency care to know what to do, but doctors didn't listen to me, saying that my throatache was just some flu. I suspected it was not flu at all, but I went home and I looked on the Internet. I found various coherent descriptions of my symptoms after less than 1 hour of googling.
So I went back to the doctors, and I carefully explained what symptoms I had and I explained what I suspect they are and why, thanks to what I found on the net. They still didn't listen to me. I therefore asked for a specialist. The specialist visited me, and she did easily found I was right, that I had strong oesophagus inflammation. I took some esomeprazol and advice (no more coffee!argh!) and everything is going right. Thanks to the Internet I had sufficient knowledge to understand I needed a specialist, instead to listen to generic doctors. This saved me A LOT of pain. of course you must took all with a grain of salt, but it can give you useful advice.
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
BTW, Three Men in a Boat is a phenomenally funny book. I highly recommend the Blackstone Audio Book version read by Frederic Davidson.
I have had several conversations with my doctor, and it appears to be no winning without open source pharmaceuticals, not free drugs, but non-patented medicine. If you remove power from Merk(example) and Cigna(also example), people would be able to have that relationship with their doctor. As it stand now, doctors have to see 50 or more patients a day to make money equivalent to their knowledge. Conversely, I have to help 6 customers a day to take home $40,000 a year, surely enough for my limited knowledge.
erin go bragh!
So prehaps part of the problem is that patents who are not having their needs addressed by a medical assimbly line are trying their best to do it themselves.
I am a physicist by training, but I've been working in theoretical and mathematical biology for almost thirty years (I started as a postdoc in the seventies).
Some medical doctors, after learning about my profession, want to show how smart they are and engage in small talk about scientific subjects. In most cases (not always) they have no idea what they are talking about. Although I am aware that a good healer does not have to be a good scientist I end up not trusting them. Why most physicians want to make us believe that they know everything?
Your comment makes me wonder if some research needs to be done to determine the effect of what all this information on the Web may have on doctors. The article notes how it takes about 5 years of clinical experience to get good at differential diagnosis. I'm sure there are positive benefits to having doctors making use of the Web in diagnosing and learning about disease and treatment, but I wonder if there aren't some negatives as well.
Maybe having the shortcut of the Web available undermines some of the experience gaining doctors go through -- for some doctors at least.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
The reason people look for more information on the internet (and occasionally believe it) is because doctors don't listen to their patients. Seriously, for anyone who's been to the doctor for anything more troubling than strep throat, it can be a huge ordeal to get doctors to spend some time listening to you and answering your questions. For people living with significant pain or other problems, the repeated ritual of the 3 minute "visit" that ends with a half-hearted "come back in 3 weeks if it's still bothering you" becomes maddening.
For the doctors out there who think the internet is responsible for their problems, I say, "Don't blame the patient for trying to the job that you're not doing." Any good doctor should be able to sit down with a patient and not only explain the process he used to come to his diagnosis, but ASK if the patient sees anything he's missed. After all, it's the patient who is the expert on their own problems. Any doctor who makes his or her patients feel listened to will find his advice treasured much more than that of a random internet site.
I went through a phase just like this*, except that for me even the reputable medical sites were enough to induce symptom-panic. When you're convinced something is wrong with you, the last thing you should be doing is looking up symptoms or diseases online. Online searches are just as likely to turn up a reference to "Deadly SriLankan MumboJumbo Disease" as they are to show you the most common (usually trivial) cause. You really need an expert to filter all that information for you.
Of course, you can't go to the doctor for every trivial question either (trust me, I tried). So if you're as messed up as I was, it can be hard to regain your perspective...
(* To make a long story short: an (ultimately minor) incident in my life blew away my youthful sense of invincibility in rather spectacular fashion, and made me all too aware of the fragility of the human body. At that point, all the minor things I used to ignore suddenly became potential threats...)
Granted, some B.S. seems to be slowly dying out - astrology and belief in space alien visitations, for example. But others seem absolutely rampant. We are awash in homeophathic medicine, claims of psychic powers, and on and on. And, yes, I include religion in this.
I guess rationality and empiricism just aren't cool these days. Perhaps people mistake skepticism with closed mindedness. Or perhaps, deep down, they just don't care whether what they believe is true or not.
I have Gout, also my chest has fallen off.
I can attribute this to symptoms of the "sniffles"
The problem I have with doctors, is you go in and describe your symptoms - and of course you have a general idea of what is wrong with you, giving off a little bias. The doctor will basically agree with whatever diagnosis you give (as long as it's minor or not easily tested) - maybe scale it up a notch or two on the 'concern-o-meter' - and then he'll give you free samples of some random drug.
I went in with some early signs of some CTS, and asked if he could do some tests to determine if my diet was right ( I explained this, and suggested blood tests as a possibility ) - so what happened, I was given five samples of some overpowered drug that could cause serious heart problems, THEN I went and got some blood tests done. Two weeks later I called and had to ask for the results of my bloodwork.
I would've finished that medication within 2 weeks. The doctor only gave it to me based on my brief description while he was distractedly running back and forth. It was WAY too powerful for my symptoms ( I researched it upon arriving home ) - but it didn't cost him anything since it was free samples.
Doctors need to not be bothered with as much idiocy, and have more time to actually examine their patients. They also need to not be giving out free drug samples to push on any little thing, if something requires drugs it should be given its proper prescription, and if they happen to have free samples and feel like offering them, more power to them.
As it stands, it's no wonder people turn to the internet to diagnose their problems - the doctors just agree with whatever you tell them anyway, so at least one of you should make an informed decision!
( This is obviously not relating to anything serious and testable, but things that cannot be easily diagnosed )
cyn, free software and *nix operating systems enthusiast.
This is a sign of a much bigger problem, many people in the US cannot afford the cost of official medicine, they're trying to find less costly alternatives.
In other countries with more or less socialized medical care (of widely varying levels of efficiency), doctors and transnational companies are trying to force the governments to have "American style" medicine, that is a carefully controlled supply of doctors, (high) prices set by medical associations, exclusive regions, constant effort to legally marginalize alternative medicine, profit-oriented control of your medical history, legally mandated medical procedures, and the creation of new categories of sicknesses that require new costly, patented medicine.
So, maybe there is some reason in not fully trusting all doctor's advice and look for a second opinion.
I said, "Doc, I think I have hypochondria"
Doc: "Go on..."
Me: "Well, what are the symptoms?"
Doc: "Anything you want them to be..."
I think he has got it totally wrong. IMHO there is an ever widening gap between scientific evidence and medicine. Just pick out some common diseases and read the description in any standard textbook for them. And then check the "truth" in the book against the current research, e.g. by searching for the appropriate keywords at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?DB=p ubmed. What you surely will notice is how little of even ten year old scientific research results ever makes it into the books. And, finally, try to find a doctor who at least knows what is in the books. Good luck!
As long as you only suffer from a few broken bones, a doctor may know what to do. But if it happens that you suffer from something not so obvious, better don't bet on your doctors scientific understanding! You may lose...
And, last but not least, modern medicine is about selling sick people expensive treatments, not about curing them. There would be no business case otherwise, or would it?
In this day and age, is it really all that crazy to believe a, perhaps, misguided site that is trying to inform you as opposed to doctors and drug companies who are mostly interested in making money off you? Not that you shouldn't trust your doctor, but...
While this may be true, I don't know what's scientific about a typical Doctor's diagnosis. It's just practice of an Art, based on experience. Typically, a Doctor will not setup an experiment and often, they won't even run any kind of instrumented test, they'll just ask you what symptoms you have, make some notes and make a diagnosis.
"My impression is that people believe more of what they read than what I tell them" Maybe 10 years ago i would have trusted what you (doctors) had to say but today you are all just sell outs!!! Last time i went for a visit because of an illness i had to wait well over an hour because you were to busy visiting with your pharmaceutical reps. by the time i got back there you had already wrote the flonase and antibiotics scripts before you even took a look at me. I am seriously looking into "alternative" treatments for everyday illnesses as I am tired of being given the medication that you get kickbacks from.. but hey if it gets you and the family an all expense paid trip to Australia paid for by glaxosmithkline I'm sure some of your patients wouldn't mind taking it to help you out.
From the Author's Advertisement from Three Men in a Boat:
:)
In Chicago, I was assured by an enterprising pirate now retired, that the sales throughout the United States had exceeded a million; and although, in consequence of its having been published before the Copyright Convention, this has brought me no material advantage, the fame and popularity it has won for me among the American public is an asset not to be despised.
US publishers stealing foreign IP? Never!
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
At least be happy that your reply gets read and understood. I reply to such emails in the same way, but a couple of friends of mine just keep forwarding the same damned thing over and over: How many times can they delete JDBMGR.EXE from their computer?
It sucks when you know the spammer and can't really do anything about it. But honestly, my situation isn't so bad anymore with currently ~3 per year while a decade ago was ~3 per week.
This is not my sig.
Try taking kid with eczema to your family doctor. Basically, main-stream professionals have little idea other than the steroids that the drug multi-nationals pump out.
Then search the web for parents who have gone from dispair to joy by trying out gluten free diets, milk alternatives, etc. Yes, it's true that we don't all have the skills to separate genuine peer-reviewed research from the internet cranks. But on the positive side, the internet has put knowledge and publication in the hands of common people.
Now, if your doctor is unable to help, be it through lack of knowledge in a specific area, lack of time, energy, enthusiasm... you have somewhere else to look.
You can still talk with your doctor about implementing alternative solutions that you've found.
I think good doctors are willing to see that it is high time that patients were willing to question the received wisdom of the health profession. There is a necessary check and balance here. And we are not all numb-skulls believing every internet crank with a miracle cure...
Surely in vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird -- Proverbs 1:17
There's a lot of actually helpful information on the web for health issues. Everytime I get a new prescription, I check drug information online and compare it against every other medication I'm taking to see what side effects might occur. I also found out a lot of information about migraines online, because my local doctors seem like they're arguing with each other about what it is I have. So at least with the web I can figure out which kind it seems like I have and do what I can to avoid them.
[insert witty quote here]
To a certain extent. Every last perscription has negative effects, some of them are very serious. If they didn't, they'd be called vitimins.
What bothers me is that drug companies are forced to down'lay the negative effects of useful drugs to even be able to use them at all. If there is any hint of a downside, they get sued. Nevermind that their drug gave someone an extra two years to live or made their last ten bearable, if there is any downside at all, they get sued. But it's worse than that. They get sued more often and pay more money when the negative effects are known and announced.
This is rediculous. You shouldn't be able to sue a drug company for known complications of their drug. You should only be able to sue if they neglected research paths that would've revealed the problem or otherwise knowingly or neglegently hindered proper research. Now if your doctor doesn't tell you about the potential downside, that's an issue.
The "statistic" that prescription drugs are the fourth leading cause of death in america fails to take into account half the reason: they also reduce most of the other leading causes of death.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Recently reintroduced to Timecube the other day. I always thought there were 6 sides to a cube, not 4...
The worst is when people believe in crank ideas like that.
Maybe if the American Medical Association and its industry didn't keep prices artificially inflated by restricting the supply of doctors, while demand explodes, doctors would be seen as respected members of the community, rather than inaccessible luxuries.
I was in the pre-med track for 10 years, starting in junior high school, and the #1 lesson for everyone is that the system is designed to "weed out" most of the people who want to become doctors. The weeding isn't done on the basis of one's compassion, or one's committment to medical science, or even to one's skill at medical practice. In fact, those essential criteria aren't even in the game until college, or even med school. Along the way, it's just pure competition, mostly measuring how much abuse people will stand, from the program and from each other, before they quit. The system lets people study subjects that get relatively easier grades than do sciences, so they are more competitive numerically. In fact, practically everything that aspiring doctors must do to get into med school selects for people who just want to make a lot of money, are indifferent to the suffering of others (or who relish it), who discard curiosity and compassion in favor of absolute focus on the bottom line: protecting their time and money from any threat, including patients.
Sure, doctors have to deal with insurance (patient and malpractice, at each end) and other dehumanizing bureaucracies when they start to practice. But by then they're in the doctor supply, so it's only the prospect of that that inhibits "people people" from staying in the game. Not only does the med school track select for people ill suited to be "caregivers" (rather than mechanics or drug pushers), it just artificially reduces the supply of people trained to help other people's medical conditions. And of course our high-stress, high-pollution, bad-diet lives create ever more medical problems to treat. The combination supply/demand problem means not enough doctors to treat too many patients, driving up prices, and driving a wedge between the people who need some of the utmost intimacy to succeed in their relationship.
Doctors make a lot of money. Pharma and insurance companies make even more. It's practically all profit: the costs of running a doctor's practice are large only when counting their insurance, which is of course driven up by the supply/demand crisis. We should extract enough of those profits, especially from insurance and pharma companies, to double or triple the number of doctors. We should expand medical schools across the country. Require the top 20% of schools, which depend on public subsidies for their research (which they then sell for profit), to double the number of graduates they produce. We have at least that many people who want to be doctors, including foreigners who need retraining/recertification, that could change the supply picture within 5-10 years. And we should require every med student who receives government subsidies to relocate to an underserved community for at least as long as they were paid to go to school - usually at least 7 years. If they're going to cash in on socialist financing of their careers, the people should get what we pay for: more doctors for more people, not more golfers at Boston golf courses.
--
make install -not war
"People who would not believe a High Priest if he said the sky was blue, and was able to produce signed affidavits to this effect from his white-haired old mother and three Vestal virgins, would trust just about anything whispered darkly behind their hand by a complete stranger in a pub."
--Maskerade
Personally, I feel like it has something to do with the source of the information. People automatically distrust doctors because they believe doctors have a vested interest in the outcome, whereas information on the Internet is of course provided free out of the goodness of strangers' hearts who have nothing to sell you.
Many years ago while I was attending college for an engineering degree, I ran into a fellow engineering student who used to be in the college of medicine. Amazed at such a drastic switch in majors, I asked him why?
He said he had to get out of medicine. Every time they discussed a new disease, he immediately came down with all the symptoms.
Since the way most doctors practice
medicine these days is to push whatever
drugs the pharamceutical companies
have given them pamphlets/vacations/samples
for do you REALLY find it all that
surprising that people are looking to self
diagnose and self treat? Vioxx anyone?
Ever heard of CoQ10?
Perhaps if people were pointed in the direction
of more competent discussions, like Grouppe Kurosawa they would realize that what they
seek doesn't require a prescription anyway!
It's like they just changed a few letters and kept on going. What the heck is pure Emu oil and why should it be good for me? Why is it so important to emphasize "pure"? are there imitation emu oils? How do they render it from those poor flightless birds? How can they expect people to continue to fall for the same old gag?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Will hiring more MDs fix the problem- NO! because DOctors are typically working all the time -getting calls from hypochondriacs, and from people who are actually sick. Familly practice and Pediatricians are about the lowest paid MDs around and they start around $80k in Kalifornia - and that's for working around 70 hours a week.
Lesson is if you want a better service - you need to pay for it.
..........FULL STOP.
It's not just medicine that this phenomenon is occuring. The ridiculous debate over trying to include Intelligent Design in biology classes as a valid theory (which it's not) falls into the same category.
The biggest problem is the lack of critical thinking by people today. Most people don't want to dig into a subject to see if what someone is saying has any validity. Instead, they try to find someone who has written something which fits their viewpoint and then go about touting it as the truth.
There are many reasons for this not the least of which is the overall education system in this country but parents aren't blameless either. Instead of challenging their children from an early age to question and explore everything around them, parents are more interested in what video game or DVD to get them.
There's a reason the scientific process is used in all areas. It allows for the cruft to be sifted out and what remains should be repeatable or verifiable facts. Instead, people don't want to listen to facts. They just want to believe what they want.
There's a saying I've said for a very long time: People do what they do because that's what people do. As this article points out, it's a very valid saying.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
It seems that traditional Western medicine based on scientific evidence is less and less trusted by the general public.
The FDA drug cartel often falls quite short of such a noble-sounding description.
Our medicine is largely driven by what can be devised to establish monopolies to extract the greatest profit for drug companies, not what would make people most well.
With most of the FDA either directly or indirectly on the payroll of the pharmaceutical companies, there is little reason to blindly trust either the FDA or their monopolies sanctioned by a combination of FDA approval and the USPTO. It becomes easier and easier to see them as ultimately similar to the illegal drug cartels, driven by profit and control, not by my best interest.
Combine this with any number of treatments that are scientifically sound and used to great effect in other countries but illegal to advertise in the US, if legal to use at all as well as a very strong placebo effect that by itself may be more positive than the approved methods that have so many side effects.
I must say, of all the people I know who are ordered to undergo chemotherapy, the ones who die are the ones who follow doctors orders, and the ones who are alive and healthy decades later (who were given a few months or years to live) are the ones who defied the doctors' orders. This is not a scientific observation, but it is clear that at the very least a prescription to undergo chemo is often wrong and disasterous to a person's health.
Add this to the fact that malpractice is such a leading cause of death (and Bush now wants to protect the medical monopolies from liability), it doesn't seem so wrong to defy doctors orders even if you are a clueless quack, and with a little intelligent research, you might do much better than you would using orthodox medical products.
However, medical students are well aware of this phenomenon (at a rational level) and soon get over it. The problem with having so much medical information (even assuming it is all trustworthy) available to the general public is that your average person has no preparation whatsoever to deal with it. Expect to find plenty of aunties with prostate cancer... :-)
Despite all of these pitfalls, I think the advantages of having broader access to information still outweight the disadvantages. If not for anything else, it keeps doctors on their toes: they are not the sole guardians of the "mystical medical knowledge" anymore.
At last, consider that in some cases you may discover on the Internet "second opinions" about some medical treatments which otherwise you would be totally ignorant about. Check this story for a very enlightening example.
I cured my Crohn's Disease with DIET.
But Doctors don't get kickbacks if they recommend a diet to cure you, so they dont.
It's where the affected person (usually women) usually does injures/affects someone lese (usually a child) nad visits doctors because of this. These are often infamous cases, No one is sure why this little kid is so sick, having daily fevers, until they catch the mother injecting feces into their kid, causing them to be sick. .P People with Munchausensoften are very good at faking things and often have SURGERY!! multiple times!!, until someone figures it out. These patients often have a warning sign - something called gridiron abdomen - i.e. it looks like a football(American) feild, from all the scar lines on it.
..........FULL STOP.
I have several maladies. Difference is they are real, and medical science so far hasn't done shit to help. Often fixing one problem leads to others.
For example, the most minor malady was acne. Popular myth says it's excited by specific foods and that it goes away on its own. Neither are correct. It's caused by bacteria, so medical science prescribes antibiotics (tetracycline or minocycline). That works. But even if you take it every day for years the moment you stop acne comes back with a vengeance.
Problem is being on antibiotics for years can damage the liver and lungs, weaken your own immune system, and possibly generate superbugs.
Another minor malady? Hair loss. Alas, Merck has the patent monopoly on propecia, so you pay through the nose for the rest of your life. I didn't have any listed side effects, and it did work as advertised. For years.
The real problem started when I got a stomach flu from food poisoning. After the flu I still couldn't eat solid food, and I lost all sense of appetite for weeks, followed by being doubled over in nausea. Later on the opposite--I could be hungry 100% of the time, even after a big meal.
Medical science came back negative on every test, gave up on me, and just diagnosed dyspepsia. They said propecia could not cause it, but imagine my surprise when stopping propecia got rid of nausea.
Now there's only the irregular appetite, sensitive constitution, and overall weakness that won't go away. Looks like medical "science" wrecked me for life.
Well, of course patients don't believe their doctors. It's begun to dawn on them that their doctors don't work for them, they work for the HMO.
Now that doctor's offices are just assembly lines to push pills, there's not the same level of trust there once was. For a lot of people, the Web fills the void. It's not too surprising, really.
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
Although there are some Christian cults that won't use traditional medicine, the largest users of alternative 'medicines' are members of the 'woo woo' crowd. People who believe in psychics, people believe that if it's 'all natural' then it's good for you, people who believe that spells and talismans will cure them, etc. The thing that they have in common is that they're pretty damn gullible.
Then there's the paranoid crowd who thinks that there's a huge conspiracy between doctors and drug companies to not cure people, etc.
I think that some people just like to believe is weird sh!t. Of course it doesn't help when CVS is selling 'homeopathic medicines.'
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
Well, it would also help if the doctors were more competant. Most of the people I know have several horror stories about misdiagnosis and otherwise apalling incompetence on the part of a doctor against themselves personally, or against one of their family or close friends.
People would put more weight in their doctor's advice, otherwise.
Someone had to do it.
Doesn't this just mean that I have every computer virus and worm out there? Or at least think I do?
Thank you very much to illustrate my point. Science never said it explain everything. This is a misunderstanding of the scientific method. Only religion attempt to explain everything, including (but not only) why we are here. Sadly they require more or less blind faith (aka : accepting without proof/logic/anything related) and try to explain something which is not see in the day-to-day life. Whereas science only attempt to explain what is observed in nature. Explain is a big word. In science you propose falsifiable hypothese and model, which then CAN BE CHECKED to be an acceptable model or not.
In that respect Evolutionism *IS* science. CReationism or Intelligent design (Quote "explain away all of creation") want to explain the WHY and HOW without using science and thus is religion (or at best, philosophy).
Again, wihtout wanting to insult you, and without being sarcastic, I thank you for pointing right away by posting an example why I think the scientific method and tenet should be teached : to *at least* have people stop comfunding a philosophical/religious hypothese, with a scientific one.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
What's in your doctor's best interest? Unless you have known and been going to the same doctor for years, that's a very real concern for most people.
Is my dr prescribing this medication because he believes it's what I need, or because he gets kick backs from the pharmasudical[sp] companies? If the latter, then why does he have all those posters for the meds he just described on his operatory walls?
No one is sacred anymore, and Drs have shown themselves to be just as corrupt as everyone else.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
...Placebitrol!
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
Stop reading between the line. I did not say that people beliving in gods are stupid. I did not even promote atheism. What I promoted is separating science from religion. When you are speaking science, then leave religion in the locker room. I might even say when you are doing religion do not misuse and bring science in churches.
Second frankly you are aware that for some people english is not even the first language, not even the second language, or not even the third language learnt ? I was self taught in english. So if on an international forum, grammar nazi like you dislike that much badly written englisch, I recommend you to go on another forum. Maybe like , Ye Olde Oxford Forum. Or just ignore the post, if you prefer to attack the form, ad hominem, instead of the content.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
What's that disease where you can't spell long words correctly?
The world has changed and we all have become metal men.
I agree and I would add this. With the internet, we're at one of those transitional points between mediums. Generally, the newer the medium, the more doubt we cast on its authority. This happened with radio and television. The written word had been around for centuries and still retained some of the vestiges of authority that had been lent by the priest and scholar classes. Even now, for most people, there's a cultural instinct to trust the newspaper more than TV or radio.
The interesting transitions happen with things like the printing press. The written word still retains some of its authority, but because it is more freely available to the common man, many more ideas can be made publically available.
Because the information on the internet is still primarily written word, it is riding on the coat-tails of the authority previously lent to books and the newspaper. As with the printing press, the marketplace of ideas will eventually sort things out. Since it's early days yet, there's still a lot of gullibility.
Plus, each transition usually makes it easier and easier to disseminate ideas to more and more people. So, more people can be taken in by bad ideas.
Take that for what it's worth: a post on the internet
SharkJumper
> I think education is the only answer
I think the modern education system is -part- of the problem.
They teach the students that 'there are no absolutely right answers' and 'people are entitled to their opinions', so that students don't realize that some things are demonstrably true and others are demonstrably false.
They teach students that there is no fundamental difference between information gathered from a poll of 100 random people on the New York subway system and the results of a laboratory experiment in controlled conditions.
They teach students that even though the subject of the class is english composition/world history/archaeology/moleculary biology, you'll really be graded on how well you agree with the instructor's view that "the real terrorism today is how America treats women/minorities/third world countries."
They teach students that the longer the list of degrees after your name, the more worthwhile the book you wrote.
I wouldn't call what most doctors do "scientific." According to the Wikipedia, the scientific method implies "observations, hypotheses and deductions." I can't remember the last time I went to the doctor and had any of these applied to me. Doctors aren't scientific because true science requires time, money, and effort... three things nobody wants to give. When was the last time you went to the doctor and actually had "observaions" taken and data gathered before a diagnosis was made? My experience has been that very little data is ever gathered before a quick diagnosis and perscription is given.
Several years ago I developed a twitch in my right eye that never went away. I went to every type of doctor looking for an answer, but no one could tell me anything. They randomly tried all kinds of drugs and told me that I was just stressed. However, after 7 years of suffering from this I decided enough was enough and set out to find a cure on my own. I spent months scouring the Internet for an answer... and eventually found one. I discovered that what I had was called "hemifacial spasm" and was caused by a blood vessell pinching a facial nerve. I also found that a relatively simple "brain surgery" could fix the problem. I told my primary care physican and neurologist about this only to be told that I was crazy and overreacting. Anyway, after contacting a brain surgeon it only took two weeks to get the problem fixed. The sad reality is that there are cures to many of the problems people have today, but good luck having your primary care physician tell you about them. Doctors aren't there to do that; they exist to make money and sell drugs! If it wasn't for the Internet and my own efforts, I would still be one of those hypochondriacs on Prozac (actually in my case they wanted to give me Paxil... bastards!)
(Not quite offtopic, since the first link is to Jerome K. Jerome's book...)
On a tangent, Connie Willis' "To Say Nothing of the Dog" is a very good, and very funny science fiction read. Somewhat loosely based on the river trip taken by the characters in Jerome's book.
There must be a reason why people are coming in from overseas, like from India and the Philippines, to take the USMLE medical licensure exam and practice medicine in the US.
That near worship of MDs was one of the underlying plots of the popular 1960s TV series "The Fugitive." Ordinary people would help Kimble escape because they believed he was innocent and would never kill someone. One woman, revealingly, does so even though he had, in his days practicing medicine, refused to give her an abortion. Although she was bitter about the back alley abortion she got, she ended up helping him escape because she realized that, if he would not abort her baby for a quick and easy profit, he wouldn't have killed his wife. In contrast, in the much more recent movie Kimble had to rely on colleagues in medicine (the 'old boy' network), and the only risky good deed he does ends up being irrelevant to the plot and predictably politically correct. The movie Kimble is a modern physician. Killing may be OK, but the greed of giant drug companies is not.
The ancient Hypocratic Oath had as one of its basic principles that an MD should never be connected with the death of a patient, even when the death would be convenient for some. Abortion and euthanasia, as the two easiest deaths to carry out, were prohibited. He knew that if physicians ever became connected with death, the profession would be in deep trouble. Every patient would be wondering, "Will he cure me or kill me?" You see that attitude most clearly in the fears of disabled people that medicine is killing them because of an alleged "poor quality of life." That why twenty-one disability groups joined prolife groups in defending the young woman in Florida. They trusted neither the courts nor medicine to do the right thing. And they are 100% right. (Ditto the mainstream media, almost never accurate about that sort of issue.)
So why should any of us trust the medical profession when they tell us that treatment X (told to us by an MD) will cure us while treatment Y (found on the Internet) will not? Physicians in the U.S. have deliverately, willfully and for profit killed more people than the Nazi SS. I don't trust the SS, why should I trust an MD? Organized medicine not only says nothing against legalized abortion, it sometimes defends it. We know for a fact that we can't trust the ethics of the medical profession. In comparison to that, anyone, even a stranger, seems more trustworthy.
In short, if the profession can't understand and act on the fact that "it" in a mother's tummy is a baby, it can't be trusted in any other area of medicine either. It's already abandoned fact and ethics for a nasty sort of political correctness (and limiting the birthrates of poor minorities). It can't come along and say, "Well yes, but for drugs that will treat your asthma, we really aren't lying and we really aren't trying to kill you." "Really," we say, "and how can we know that?"
And yes, I know that in most areas, physicians are working hard and scientifically to save lives and not to kill. I worked for two years treating kids with cancer. But this is about ethics and trust. If you have it, you have it. If you don't, you don't. All else is details.
The tale is told of a man who asks a pretty and socially prominent young woman if she'd sleep with him for $50,000. She giggles and makes it clear she would. Then he asks her if she'd do it for $50. In outrage, she says, "What kind of woman do you think I am?" The man replies, "We've already settled that. We're just haggling about the price."
In the same fashion, modern medicine has already demonstrated what sort of profession it is. We, as a society are just haggling about the price. If a few hundred dollars justifies an abortion, why shouldn't a few hundred dollars of kickback for prescribing medicine A instead of medicine B, also be OK? After all, we're just haggling about the price and, in the latter case, no one is likely to die.
--Mike Perry, Seattle, editor Eugenics and Other Evils
Please! No more reality TV shows! AAAHHH!
The sad thing about hypochondriacs is that they will get off their asses to go see a doctor every time something feels wrong, but they rarely will eat better, exercise, sleep more, avoid stresses, etc. Build up your immune systems, people! Stop making yourselves sick!
It's a fairly complex process they go through, and unfortunately, it can take weeks sometimes - bottlenecks are everywhere. Insurance and labs alone are the worst.
No doubt the 'net helps us be informed, but if you can at least discuss it with your doctor, then you can get somewhere. This removes the old catch 22 (medical encyclopedia can be intimidating to read through), often breaks it down for the patient, and gives them the information - but as demonstrated for a long time even before this, insufficient knowledge is dangerous.
This sig no verb.
traditional Western medicine based on scientific evidence is less and less trusted by the general public.
Most doctors, in my experience (more than I like) seem completely incapable of understanding science, or statistics for that matter. Most doctors also don't seem to give a damn.
In the end, there probably are some serious hypochondriacs out there, but we are all better off being able to get up-to-date medical information on the web and being able to reach people with the same medical conditions as we quickly and easily.
Of course, doctors don't like it: their monopoly on knowledge is eroding.
Epitaph seen on the town Hypochondriac's headstone:
See? I told you I was sick.
-- Mace only makes me hornier.
"Dr. Flox's Internet Uncture - Sooths chapped skin & skinned chaps."
"For one week only - free box of tissues & one-handed PC keyboard"
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
...a lot of doctors and pharmaceutical corporations are no longer operating with the patient's best interests at heart. They are soley driven by money and they are overprescribing certain profitable meds. Look at the whole Celebrex fiasco. The company knew that Celebrex caused problems, but decided that it was better to make money even if people died.
We also have a massive epidemic of medical prescriptions for supposed A.D.D. kids. Did anyone ever stop and think that the A.D.D. kids might just be... I don't know... normal bored kids? I used to day dream in class a lot because the subject matter sucked. But I wasn't sitting there totally spaced even though it looked it. I was doing circuit design in my head for various projects (robots to kill the school bullies, bombs to blow up teacher's cars that I didn't like, remote display systems so that I could gain access to computer systems remotely during dull history tests, etc...). Or when I was wandering all over the place during basketball games in gym class... that wasn't A.D.D. That was just that I hate sports and find competition to be an abrasive characteristic. Cooperative games, I was all into. (You know. The thing like taking the parachute and throwing it up as a group and huddling underneath it and then throwing it up again and siting outside of it. Now that's my idea of fun sports.)
Then we have the problem of big pharma pushing antibiotics without warning people that they should be replenishing their G.I. tract with probiotics lest other horrific diseases infest your body. I had a very personal experience with this. Horrible sinus infections every year since my teens. So... the cure? Antibiotics. Sure I was happy and I got better, but I didn't realize the damage that was being done. Every year the sinus infections got incrementally worse and I had to take longer and longer course of antibiotics. Finally when I was in my late 20s, I was prescribed a new (and very dangerous) antibiotic in the Quinolone family. It was called Levaquin. After the first few days of taking it, I had unbelievable depression. I told my doctor that I thought it might be caused by the Levaquin even though it makes no scientific sense since antibiotics are not psychoactive. He agreed and said, just keep taking them. I did, and it just got worse and worse. After the 14 days, it took me about two or three months to start feeling normal again.
The next year, I had a really bad infection but didn't want to feel that horrible depression again. I did some searches on the net and discovered that other people were reporting depression caused by Levaquin in various forums. So I realized I wasn't alone. Unfortunately, I still had the sinus infection and still wound up taking antibiotics, but I was able to tell my doctor to skip the Levaquin. (Levaquin is being pushed hard right now because it supposedly has fewer side effects than other antibiotics) This time around, I got a horrible skin rash that was extremely uncomfortable. Again 10-14 days of antibiotics. But this time two weeks after the course ended, the sinus infection came back. So I was on the meds again for another 14 day course. An entire summer ruined.
The next year, same thing... Horrible sinus infection even worse than the previous year. I wound up doing still more reseearch on the net and found some information on systemic yeast infections. The symptoms were identical to mine and the root cause in many cases appears to be antibiotics. Even more research revealed that the company that makes Levaquin finally acknowledged that Levaquin can cause depression and suicidal thoughts in "a small number" of patients. Sorry, but ANY number of people with depression or suicidal thought is too large.
I had experienced the suicidal thoughts myself, but it's not connected to depression. It's actually a lot like a safety mechanism gets switched off in the brain and you forget very basic things you should be aware of to keep safe. I almost took a drill to my head because
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
... are a fucking idiot if you posted that thinking it was informative and not a complete fucking joke.
The top causes of death in this country are things like heart disease, cancer, strokes, etc. Even if some of the deaths due to cancer and strokes were due to medical mistakes, the person probably would have died ANYWAY.
Hopefully, you posted that as an instance where the web hurts hypochondriacs (sp?) and increases the public's mistrust of doctors. If not, you need to read some more pages on the web to get the rest of the story.
IANAL, but I play one on
Oh, wait. Scientologists don't ask for prescriptions.
Nevermind.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Cancer or MS... cancer or MS... Hmmm... Server 2003 is actually decent... but I think, in the long run, cancer has a lower TCO.
Plus, there's still hope that science may one day cure cancer.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
But my doctor says no, it's all in my head.
For several years, I was suffering from severe Asthma--coughing, sick all the time, couldn't work, sleeping 12 hours a day. Several different doctors prescribed six dozen different things, and nothing seemed to help. Finally, in desperation, I started doing my homework, and came to the conclusion (with the help of the medical websites) that the underlying problem was GERD--i.e. reflux. (It turns out that stomach acid can get in the esophagus and cause all kinds of problems.) I suggested this to my doctor, and he agreed that that was a possibility, and prescribed Nexium. Wham-bam! In two days, I could breath, and last year was the first year in a long time in which I haven't had a cold that wouldn't go away for a month or more. If I had just been a good patient and kept taking Asthma meds, I'd still be sick. In this case, the doctor just didn't have the time or the feel for my body to know what diagnosis made sense and what didn't. By becoming well-informed, I was able to do a better diagnosis than he could.
In another case, I recall when I was first diagnosed with ADHD (at the age of 26.) This diagnosis was made by two separate psychologists, with much testing and great care. I agreed with the diagnosis, because it fit my experience. However, when I went to a psychiatrist, he decided in about 20 minutes that I was really bipolar (I'm not) because I was training to be a minister, and without explaining that he had changed the diagnosis, prescribed a mood stabilizer. I spent the most hellish month of my life having all my wit, intelligence, energy, and will sapped by this awful drug before my wife finally put her foot down and found me another doctor who would listen. Oddly enough, the new doctor (a general practitioner willing to treat ADHD) listened to me, listened to the psychologists, and treated for ADHD, with excellent results. The sad thing is that, if this worthless non-English speaking shrink had said to me, "I think you're bipolar" I could have told him 16 dozen reasons why the diagnosis didn't fit. But he too busy being impressed with himself to think I could form a reasoned opinion.
The reason patients don't trust doctors? Because we shouldn't trust them! The bottom line is that the old, paternalistic line of "doctor knows best" doesn't work. I have to take responsibility for my own health, and the doctor should be a consultant rather than an autocrat. Unfortunately, many doctors haven't learned this, and continue to play nonsense like obscuring diagnoses and refusing to let patients have access to their own test results without a court order.
Study after study has shown that the reason quack medicine is so popular is because people want to take charge. The sooner the medical community gets off its high horse and accomodates this, the better.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
...I didn't realize I was addicted to porno until I got on the internet.
The neutrality of this sig is disputed.
If you're absolutely certain that you have a bad case of hypochondria, but you go to a doctor and he says you're not showing any symptoms and you're fine, does that mean you really do have hypochondria? I call this the Hypochondria Paradox.
A problem can be exacerbated it cannot exacerbate. I suggest the poster stick to teensy-weensy words until he/she learns a bit more syntax and grammar. A little english wouldn't hurt either.
I had gastritis for about a year or so. I didn't know what I had, I feared it might be cancer... until I heard some doctors talk about the helycobacter pilori.
So I went to the gastroenterologist to diagnose me. He made me a biopsia and the HP results were negative. However, he found out i had a hiatal hernia. While this implies I will need surgery sometime later, I'm glad I finally found out what I have and how to treat it.
The problem is when doctors DON'T diagnose you and keep you in the dark for God knows how many years.
Netcraft confirmed it,
you insensitive clod!
She is verrrrry much a hypochondriac that turns to the web to confirm her fears. One particular instance which comes to mind is her calling me at 3am one night, crying in pain, because she convinced herself that she had a yeast infection, looked up how to cure one online (douching with a mixture of vinegar and some other things), and tried to 'fix it'....yeah that was a fun night.
When I banged my knee last year, and it swelled up about 4 days later, I thought of going to the doctor. Wasn't sure if they'd do anything for me, but I was pretty sure they'd take a few $100 in x-rays. From what I found on the web, it sounded like I just had "acute bursitis", and that it would go away on its own in 4-8 weeks. And that's exactly what happened.
I had a patient this week actually tell me that the information I supplied her was wrong and that she knew I was lying to her, because she had gotten the real information from watching CSI.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.
I thought that medical insurance for a family of 4 in the US is at least $10K/year, and has been going up 5-10% per year.
In the PC realm - a lot of people jump to the conclusion that their "private information" was stolen from their PC or through a virus if they have a weird transaction or if their credit card doesn't work one day.
In the Apple space - websites will post isolated incidents of problems - then suddenly it becomes a public outrage just because 10 other people have the same problem.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
...web hydroponics?
Damn, must be the smoke in here...
My other SIG is a Sauer.
The same happened to me a few months ago, so I asked the doctor about that.
His explanation was that, while you basically had to wait for the viral infection to go away by itself, there was an increased risk of opportunistic bacterial infections, and this is what the antibiotics were supposed to prevent.
Sounded pretty plausible to me.
I read on /. that I could have this problem, therefore I don't. If you think about it long enough it's a contradiction.
Why UNIX?
while it is easy to blame it all on the internet (a cheap shot by the article author) tv is the real culprit for the proliferation of patients who think they know more than their doctors and even attempt self diagnosis.
But behind the tv scenes are pharmaceutical companies with bloated pockets, streaming information relevant only to doctors direct to the public through tv ads.
Medication (and related information) that cant be obtained without prescription should not be advertized on tv since this leads to panic_by_vulnerability thus over zealous hypochondriacs.
"Three Men in A Boat" is his best book. If you are a fan of British humor, you must read it--and you can even read online as a result of it being in the public domain.
It does get a bit twee at times, but if you like P.G Wodehouse, you'll like this.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil
Information hypochrondia is commonly reported in med school too. The students are learning about new diseases, then start imaging they might getting these symptoms.
I saw it on TV. I'm sure I have it.....
...to have emergency physicians unencumbered by the profit concerns of a corporation."
They sold it to me.
www.aaem.org for a counterpoint:
"AAEM believes that the active enforcement of prohibitions on the corporate practice of medicine is essential. This is particularly so in the specialty of emergency medicine where physicians serve as an important component of the health care safety net of our society. Emergency physicians must remain free of corporate influence because of their difficult role as advocates for the under and uninsured patient. The AAEM firmly believes it is in the best interest of the citizens
CAFTA and Dietary Supplements
I have not had health insurance for almost 2 years. I've solved several little things in that time using procedures suggested on the web. It's been immensely useful and as a result I've saved a ton of money by not running to the doctor with every little thing that crops up. (As an added bonus, it feels really good to heal yourself.)
There's a pretty obvious difference between the hocus-pocus stuff like ear candling or channeling my inner pyramid and legitimate health advice. Mostly it just comes down to getting to know what household chemicals can be safely used to treat simple things and then learning how to apply them correctly. Sure there's a lot of crap out there, but it's pretty easy to see what has a chance of working vs. the stuff that doesn't even sound real.
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
Perhaps we should set caps on the amount of money that people can sue doctors for, which will cause the doctors' insurance premiums to go down...
Nope. In a free market system, companies charge what the market will bear. Insurance companies will keep raising their prices until doctors stop buying their product. Reducing their costs by limiting payouts will not change that. Huge share-holder driven insurance companies are in favor of limiting malpractice payouts--it's not because it will reduce their prices.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
urban-legend emails. My relatives seem to believe anything forwarded by a friend. My favorite one described how the sweeteners in diet pop form wood alchohol in the brain, leading to arthritis, paralysis and other conditions. I shudder to think what home remedies and folk wisdom would have been forced upon me had email existed when i was young.
Perhaps if the US health system had not devolved to a racket run by marketing companies that masquerade as health insurance firms then doctors would not have been forced to become nothing more than drones with clipboards, checklists, and drug company provided pamphlets.
y topenic_purpura
My sister-in-law almost died last year because a TEAM of doctors at Sutter Health that were experts kept mis-diagnosing her illness. They tried a treatment that put her in ICU for a _month_.
If it was not for several tens of pages printed from sites like WebMD, etc. about her illness (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrombotic_thromboc
Thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura, TTP. Very rare, they REFUSED to believe that's what was causing the problems. They REFUSED to offer the treatments in all the stuff I was digging up. When they finally did begin the treatments that I had been urging them to begin weeks before, she got better...
Next... My father-in-law just about died this last spring. They were POSITIVE that he had pneumonia. classic case. Gave him just about every antibiotic under the sun, and he kept getting worse. well, it turns out that around here (Sacramento Valley) there is a kind of rare condition called "Valley Fever" that is often mis-diagnosed as pneumonia. We told the Dr.s that after a week of him sitting in a hospital bed as we trusted their "expert" opinions to JUST FUSKING TEST FOR VALLEY FEVER, guess what happened... He had Valley Fever!
In both cases, if the Drs. had done the same research that I was able to do, they would have at least explored the options and saved a shit load of money, and just about killed two members of of my wife's family.
But as soon as you show up at the Dr. with printouts from WebMD, they immediately dismiss anything you say.
This is mostly because the health system allows Dr.s 10 minutes per patent, and will only pay for tests if they are absolutely necessary.
If you have not had to deal with this kind of scenario, consider yourself lucky.
What I don't know I just fake...
I'm referring to other measures of body fat content, not BMI. BMI is bunk.
I agree with you on this. BMI, or Body Mass Index, is usually measured as mass/(height ^2), with mass usually in kilograms and height usually in meters. The wikipedia article I linked to lists anything under 20 BMI as "underweight", 20-25 as "ideal", 25-30 as "overweight" and over 30 as "obese".
Note that this is based only on body weight and height, nothing else. The BMI of a 400-pound, 6 foot tall bodybuilder is 54, which is listed as severely obese (when in fact the person might have 1 or 2% body fat). The BMI of someone of average wight and tall, but who gets no exercise would look like an ideal range. So while the BMI has some value when applied to large populations, it isn't really very relevant when applied to just one person. The lesson is that it would be appropriate to deal with broader indices of health rather than just BMI.
Have you ever wondered How to Take Over
The Drugs I Need
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The body is very complicated and various diseases and illnesses illicit the same symptoms (headache, fever anybody?). Somebody correct me (please), but from what I can tell, the secret is that doctors also don't know what the fuck is going on most of the time, so each patient is essentially an "experiment", which is why you have to take 2 aspirin and call in the morning instead of just taking it and assuming it solved the problem. A lot of diagnosis relies on the history of diseases in a given geographic location. Present the same symptoms to some doctor on the other side of the globe, and they may tell you you have some completely different disease, local to their area.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
1995-present: "Hey this is Windows and I'm not at work; why would I wanna bother with silly passwords if I don't have to?"
^^
Current medicine does not adequately diagose many disorders - lupus, liver & pancreatic cancer, digestive and organ disorders of many stripes. Patent medicine is the bane of our health system, then and now. The FDA, a descendent of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, is a total captive of the pharmas. The pharmas have their fingers in EVERYTHING - med schools, international politics, regulators, fake/sandbagged drug tests, even my kids (*receiving* $$$$). Even now pharmas are lobbying all out to ban access to vital nutrients in CAFTA. The best selling drugs are often really dangerous and usually dispensed wholely unnecessarily. Statins (for cholesterol) that zonk your liver and co-Q10 production (cardiomyopathy in several years), oral antibiotics that trash your disgestive/immune system (killed everything...SIBO), proton inhibitors for "heartburn" in middle aged people who often have frank hypochlorhydria (too LITTLE acid) and now are open to infections that the acid should zap and depletes their pancreatic enzymes, recurring "antidepresssant" psychotic episodes in the news (remember Columbine HS?!), etc, etc. Unfortunately many MD doctors are highly educated, dogmatic souls that have missed the real science underneath the 20th century and now don't recognize symptoms familiar to the 19th century. Honestly, medicine on average has lagged science by 50-150 years for centuries. Unfortunately, technological gizmos are NOT science, and medicine is still lagging basic science by many decades and getting worse on generic biochemistry and deficiency/degenerative diseases. Read Linus Pauling, Abram Hoffer. Strongly biochemical based forms of "alternative medicine" (orthomolecular medicine, many naturopaths, ND) have really useful answers. Better answers. Don't be a Darwin Awardee - read and think for yourself. I suggest Lef.org and www.doctoryourself.com for alt med sites with good technical references for starters. Good Luck, reader-thinkers.
Perhaps you should revisit that one. After reading through everything I could get my hands on regarding Aspartame, I came to the conclusion that the toxic effects are by no means mythological.
Aspartame DOES contain methanol (wood alcohol). This has never been disputed.
Part of the advertising Monsanto (the creator of Aspartame), does to counter is to say that some fruit and vegetable juices, like Tomato juice, also contain small amounts of methanol, and since nobody ever died from drinking vegetable juice, the alarmists should shut up and go home. It is important to remember, however, that when occurring naturally, (like in tomato juice), methanol never appears alone. In every case, ethanol is present, and usually in much higher amounts. Ethanol is an antidote for methanol toxicity in humans. In diet pop, however, there is no ethanol present and so the methanol is absorbed and carries on to have its toxic effects. Pretty straight forward.
Interestingly, Monsanto uses the internet to spread the idea that Aspartame toxicity is an urban legend in much the same way that an urban legend would spread, except Monsanto has the advantage of being able to push with lots of extra dollars.
It's just as inadvisable to completely disregard everything said on the internet as it is to believe it wholesale. At some point a little work is required from the viewer. Nobody can be entirely trusted to give the right answers, so people need to dig and think for themselves.
-FL
Herman
Funk is responsible for your mood. You can score it any day on Radio W.E.F.U.N.K.
Stick Men
Check out http://www.alternativescience.com/james-randi.htm to see how he Mr. Randi actually handles challenges.
My mother-in-law saw this rash and nearly demanded that I go to urgent care. Naturally, she raised my concern. First, though, I waded through the WebMD diagnostic criteria -- they help you narrow your symptoms and decide if and when you should see a doctor (and of what type). Based on this information, I decided not to go to the doctor, and two days later my symptoms were completely gone. Saved me an $80 co-pay, some serious stress, etc.
So yeah, the information on the Web may be a playground for hypochondriacs, but it also allows those of us capable of critical thinking and analysis to avoid unnecessary trips to a physician.
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
I'll dispute that the whole molecule contains methanol, what it does contain is a methyl ester. The ester does not have the toxic properties of the alchohol.
and read the referenced work, Jerome K. Jerome's shriekingly funny "Three Men In A Boat". I read it at age 13 at the behest of my school's headmaster, an Englishman, and have been recommending it to friends and family for the intervening 32 years. For those who know nothing about the story, it recounts a boating trip on the river Thames through the English countryside by three friends and a satanic terrier named Montmorency. Highly recommended, and I guarantee healthy, hearty belly-laughs. The reference to the author's hypochondria comes at the very beginning of the first chapter, but I urge everyone to read the entire work. The Wikipedia article even has one of my favorite quotes from the story, and as it rightfully says, it is nothing less than amazing how fresh the story still seems after 116 years.
Indeed, and for some types of problem particularly including many musculo-skeletal conditions, releasing "inner light and thought-energy" is effective when done in certain ways.
The configuration of your muscles is largely governed by your nervous system. To a lesser extent, so is the pattern of heat and fluid flow through the body, as well as the pattern of bone growth, immune response, and internal organ function. What's the obvious way to reconfigure the programming of your nervous system? Hint: It's not a pill, not surgery, and not coarse electrical stimulation.
Just as you reprogram a computer in the languages it uses through the keyboard (or whatever), not by poking the individual transistors (which even has no effect on error-correcting machines), similarly you reprogram a nervous system most effectively in the languages it responds to, through the I/O it offers for the purpose.
The subjective experience of "thought-energy" (whether it's physical in origin or entirely imaginary), especially when it's focused in certain places in the body, has been found to be one of those effective languages for reprogramming a nervous system's musculo-skeletal configuration.
In my experience (I practice massage), the subjective feeling of moving energy within the body (whether that's physical in origin or merely imaginary) is more effective than merely visualising a corrected musculo-skeletal configuration (such as visualising a better posture), and also more effective than physically stretching the body into the new configuration.
Also, regarding placebos: There are studies in which the placebo effect has been shown to be more effective for some conditions than the medical treatment it replaces, with both significantly more effective than no treatment. (Obviously there are many studies where it isn't more effective. It depends on a lot of factors).
Whatever you think about placebos and "in the mind" medicine, don't dismiss it. When there's a real condition, and it's a type of condition for which the facts indicate mind medicine is effective, then it's prudent to use it.
Unfortunately, it's much more difficult to conduct good controlled trials of medicine which is facilitated by subjective mental processes, than to trial substances. Even designing such trials is a challenge: double-blind trials rest on several kinds of logical assumptions of statistical independence, which are technically invalid and practically difficult to arrange when "mental intention" is part of the process to be measured. The very act of a person choosing to participate in a trial is by itself a modification of the trialled conditions of subjective mental intention, which complicates the analysis and all sorts of logical riddles are used to argue for or against this type of medicine as a result.
-- Jamie
There can be good and bad to this. My personal example.
After a weekend working on the cottage, cutting grass, doing construction, and such, I noticed I had lost the feeling my baby toe on one of my feet.
Extensive internet hunting, had me convinced I either had a brain tumour, or West Nile disease. D'oh.
Several trips to my Doctor later, nothing was resolved at all, a few basic blood and neurological tests revealed nothing.
So I went back to the web. And did a lot of hunting. And came across the fact that pinched nerves in the back can lead to this. I thought I'd give chiropractic a try. While I think practicers of chiropractic oversell it (loose up your spine, and cure all the disease of your body, kind of thing), it was useful for releasing the pressure on my nerve, and restoring the feeling in my toes. Several trips to my Doctor failed to bring this relief.
Regular stretches for my back, and I'm fine.
While at first I did have some hypochondria, in the end, it helped me solve a problem that my Doctor failed to.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Meanwhile, some dubious theory from the Internet will be swallowed hook, line and sinker nine times out of 10.
Meanwhile, some dubya's theory on the Tv set will be swallowed hook, line and sinker nine times out of 10.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
The primary MD is receving very little of that $10k. HMOs are a whole industry, where none really existed before, and soak up a fair amount of of that money. Much goes to increased costs of practicing defensive medicine to ward off spurious lawsuits, HMO lawyers, paying for uninsured people, oh yeah nursing homes since not many want to take care of grandma. The primary MDs are far down the trickle.
Health care costs are rising that much per year, but doctors salaries have been dropping about 5%/year too.
..........FULL STOP.
The overall percentage of foreign trained MDs in the US is only a few percent.
..........FULL STOP.
So is the solution to lower standards for doctors so we can graduate more? I don't trust that thinking. Med schools are hard to get into for a reason!
5 76236
Plus, NOBODY is holding out on the primary care doctors: it's just so DAMN HARD to convince a new doctor to enter primary care. The ONLY ones who do it are certainly not in it for the money (specialties pay beter) or the hours (~60 a week, holidays and weekend work as well). Foreign medical grads are filling many of these spaces right now. The people, the personal connection that a doctor can form with the patients, that is the ONLY reason still attracting people to primary care. That's discounting the drug-seekers, dirtbags and jerks who abuse the system and the staff, and MAN do I see a lot of those where I work.
Now I'll reference a post I made about the fiscal reality of the primary care office where I work, which can help explain the problem.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=149656&cid=12
"Cheeze it!" - Bender
1 lb. beefsteak, with 1 pt. bitter beer every 6 hours
1 ten-mile walk every morning
1 bed at 11 sharp every night
And don't stuff your head with things you don't understand.
I like science and scientific view, there is nothing against it in general, but it often leads to a very bounded point of view and this very often in medicin.
:)
You have this and that sympthom, so you have this desease. POINT. Nothing else could it be.
There was a studiy saining this and that, so this is the fact and nothing else. Everybody interessted in biology will discover sooner or later that the hole system is much more complex then some parts and this is where most scientists are looking at. They analyze a tiny part and this must be the reason whatsoever, try to find a fix to reduce the sympthoms and think they found a cure.
It's like sitting in a box and analyzing their walls, yes. This must be the universe and I now know how it works. Then the box breaks up and, ohh. This is the universe but it's just another box.
One of the many examples is dietethics, if not even the worst. Every year another book comes out with complete new values what contains how much energy. Some years ago, cellulose didn't have any energy, now it has. But in fact, nobody even know how much enegery the body needs, how much he processes of what input, how the bowel works exactly and it processes,.... So many questions, but the answers, they are of course, the right ones.
Medicin is another good example. You have this and that sympthom, so you have this disease. Taking this and that alters the body chemical reaction, so the disease is gone. But they not even know how the body controlls his chemical balance exactly, but this doesn't seem to matter. Fixing the illness means fixing the sympthoms, not fixing the origin. And best, if they have to take their medicin daily for the rest of their lives, this makes money.
As I and mostly every other Vipasanna student has discovered, 95% of all deseases are purly psychosomatic. Nobody knows how interaction of mind and body works completly, how subconsciousness affects the body, where it even beginns and how far it goes.
Of course, there are illnesses you can't fix with fixing your mind, and broken arm will medition not heal, but it will heal the impact the break had on your mind. And it always has an inpact on your subconsciousness, everything does and will most probable lead to another illness in the distant future.
It may be hard to belive, because Vipasanna is no doctrine, sect or belive. It's a technique you have to practice. It's also nothing you can quickly do and experience wonders
Vipasanna is a very purly observation meditation, where you will experience realitly as it is and not how you want it to be and through this purify your mind from all the bad impacts your environment had on you.
Real Vipasanna courses are always hold for free, so you have nothing to loose and are open for everyone, because they are no religion whatsoever.
Good courses are organized by the Vipasanna Organization [URL:http://www.dhamma.org], but there are also other organizations that seems more or less good.
kindly regards daniel
Humans are (from the research I've read), for survival reasons, in a default growth mode (not maintenance) because it results in bigger humans that are more of a match for the challenges we face (jumping large streams, running faster from predators, supporting our huge brains).
Thus, we crave foods that provide that growth. This includes high-energy-density foods with lots of fats and fast energy foods with lots of sugars.
Peanut butter contains LOTS of fats. If you're normal, you buy Skippy or Jiff (not organic PB), which have almost all the Peanut oil removed then soybean or other vegetable oils put back in (pure peanut oil sells for lots more than soybean oil). The taste isn't quite the same, but it's close, and no one seems to care. Organic PB only has peanuts, nothing else, and tastes much better, but the oil tends to separate while it's on the shelf, so you have to stir it each time you use it (a small price for some, a large price for others).
So, when you look at a chart that shows how healthy peanut oil is (ratio of saturated vs. unsaturated) compared to other things, rethink how healthy having lots of PB is. Yes, it's better than Ho-Ho's. No, it's much worse than a cucumber. The trick is keeping the 80% complex carbs 10%fat 10%protein thing going. Plus, that's complex carbs, NOT sugars or white bread, so we're talking about whole wheat, wheat germ, most vegetables, and limited fruits (lots of simple sugars there).
The American Dietetic Association has a great book on how to eat. I'm very surprised this kind of stuff isn't mentioned in Heath classes in schools (at least I didn't get it, and I suspect this is news to most people here, and it shouldn't be).
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
Okay, yes, you are technically correct, but you're also splitting hairs.
From the Aspartame promotional website. .
Anyway, the point here is not who is most right and most wrong in the picky details. The point is that Aspartame is toxic and that the corporations and government boards are lying through their teeth about it. That's what really matters in the final analysis, wouldn't you agree?
-FL
I started reducing my sugar intake and suddenly, I find most processed foods too sweet to eat without grimacing.
The more I become aware of how the food industry works in all its varied levels, the more I find myself gravitating towards things which are actually good for the body and mind. It took surprisingly little effort, and I now really enjoy what I eat, I feel really good after eating it, and I literally cannot stomach much of the stuff generally considered normal in the North American diet. I remember actually enjoying McDonnald's food, but these days a Rotton Ronald burger tastes like it's made from patties of shit.
--After I started eating free range beef and other organic foods, there's no going back. Holy smokes! I had no idea beef and chicken could taste and smell so amazing! Most people are walking around with dead taste buds and fogged brains. When the clarity starts to come as you de-tox, it's like walking through a door into another world. That was my experience, anyway.
-FL
Still. .
It seems a little silly to be eating a known poison in the first place, and one produced by a corporation with such a shamefully long track record of deceit and foul play.
I tend to think that by eating Monsanto's product, is to accept Monsanto's low moral position in the world, and to welcome the villainy not just into the world, but into one's body. Like giving the nod and a wink to a serial rapist.
Accepting or rejecting such things acts in a powerful way to define who each of us is, and that it takes both curiosity and elegance to shape ourselves and the world differently through our choices and actions.
The perceived need for diet pop is produced artificially anyway. Why do people feel happy about letting large corporations dictate their behavior? Of course, I know the answer to that, since I used to be that way as well as I was a kid who had no shields up to protect my brain against advertising. I understand the trap, but as an adult I now recognize that it is possible to make new choices and take charge of who I am. There is power in not bending over for liars and killers.
Methanol metabolizes into formaldehyde, which attacks nerves throughout the brain, most notably those which connect the eye to the brain. This is why methanol can make you blind; it literally dissolves the nerve and disconnects the eye. I mean, sheesh! I'd rather just reject such stuff from my diet altogether than mess around with balancing fruits with my poisons, which is not something that most soda pop drinkers do.
But whatever. I guess is can be hard to let go of one's favorite treat. Life is short, so why not enjoy it with your favorite corporate beverage? But still. . . I may simply have different priorities than most, but I tend to think that once people know, they have new options to choose from. As they say; "Knowledge protects. Ignorance endangers."
Okay, man!
I've got to run. It's been very refreshing to post with you! You're one of the better Slashdotters. I've run into many whose egos do not allow their viewpoints to move in any direction. Cheers!
-FL
so are the ac's