I think that we need to somehow change how google lists medical conditions. It seems that it lists them by number of hits or who pays the most instead of what is the most common answer. When you type symptoms or a medical condition, often the thing that comes up first is WrongDiagnosis which is sponsored by attorneys. So, when you type headache, you get stories of missed tumors or bleeds and how to sue instead of descriptions of what is a tension headache. It is even worse when you look up belly pain, the first sites are for lawyers and the second sites are for herbal tonics.
So, with Google we get people who come to the ER convinced they have a tumor or bleed who dont believe us when we say it is a migraine and others who go home convinced we are idiots because we didnt prescribe the herbals that they saw on the internet.
I cant even go into medications because I am fed up with all the people who come in with seizures becuase they stopped their dilantin once they looked it up and saw all the attorney adds.
3 comments:
Interesting posts and I'll come back. Going to bed as feel like Dorothy going down in the poppy field. :)
I see you've been getting spammed. If you want to stop them or minimize the spam ..activate your word verification. Doesn't completely eradicate, but does help a lot.
I've seen that but because it says wrong dx ..I just exit back out. i didn't even realize that is what it is about.
Sometimes a little bit of knowledge is dangerous and can scare oneself if don't have all the facts or know how to apply them correctly.
Those people are the idiots. It's one thing to present and/pr question ..but entirely another when one of you has a medical degree and the other does not.
That being said ..I do think there are sometimes alternatives to traditional medicine that may not be readily embraced by the medical community ..but one has to use common sense and apparently these people you describe do not.
And regarding the internet ..people need to know their sources?
It's just dumb to stop your meds without physician knowledge/approval.
The Google rank (which links are shown first) is a count of how many web pages include that link.
This count is also weighted by the rank of each source page. This is somewhat circular, so Google processes the information repeatedly to set the final rank of each page.
There has been much gaming of the Google rank, which Google opposes by attemping to analyze what is going on and de-rank pages which are playing such games.
One gaming strategy is to create hundreds of web pages which link to each other to build a high rank among themselves, then sell links to people who want their paticular web page to be highly ranked.
So, I expect that many advertisers of medical remedies use some such technique to get a high rank for themselves, swamping the relatively few sources of plain, scientific information.
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