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.' "

Comments

Re:Funny but sadly insightful

[SlothB77]

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

I may start a flare-up, but evolution does not explain away all of creation, as something must first be created to eventually evolve.

Forget about the topic...

[jamrock]

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.