The way people online constantly say ‘talk to your doctor’ like it’s a panacea is a lot like how medieval peasants weren’t able to read scripture and they just had to trust their clergy’s interpretations
Sick of it. Usually it’s not even like if I’m trying to find out if I have fucking cancer, I’m saying oh i feel sad in the evenings. why in the NAME of GOD would i want to then, for that, find the guy’s number, call, leave a message cause it’s midnight, wait for them to call back, schedule something 2 weeks later, worry the whole time, and try to remember and rephrase in formal clinical terminology exactly what’s happening and get formal cold clinical advice for it from a guy I see twice a year. Just tell me! Give me colloquial advice and home remedies! good god!
There could be so many miracle tips or tricks online that really work but nooo people constantly shout ‘talk to your doctor! call your doctor!’ i don’t want to fucking call the doctor, medical environments give me anxiety and all the bureaucracy and insurance and bills don’t help matters either.
some zoomers on tiktok seem to get this and happily share ‘oh this worked for me!’ and usually it’s somewhat helpful and a very nice, casual interaction that doesn’t involve interaction with an authority figure and potential bills. it’s that easy.
‘ooh what about liability’ don’t care. liability has destroyed modern america, gatekeeping knowledge behind a culture of fear. if you’re so scared about liability over a reddit comment, simply don’t say anything! rather than leaving a pointless piece of advice that every single person on the planet knows is the default ‘ideal’ answer, that isn’t necessarily actionable for many who don’t have easy or trivial access to healthcare.
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yeah, this is exactly what i mean.
“Talk to you doctor.” i love that, like a mic drop. i don’t understand people’s burning desire to be so ostentatious about this point. yes yes yes obviously that is the best case scenario. congratulations, you posted the most generic answer to any question, take 40 points, awesome. it’s just this arbitrary blind faith in authority – can you imagine how many billions of dollars are spent by health insurance companies in the US to cultivate this exact line of thought in the populace? 100 years ago they only recently discovered you needed to wash your hands, and people act like they’re infallible deities.
“You know what they call alternative medicine that’s been proved to work? - Medicine.”
great, and now it’s gatekept to doctors only rather than being accessible to the common populace. W.
It’s a generic answer because it’s the only responsible answer. To give someone medical advice when you have no medical expertise is highly irresponsible because not only are you potentially misleading the person asking, but countless others who read the discussion.
It should only ever be “talk to your doctor” because medical advice is one thing the Internet cannot provide and no one should be enlisting others in helping them treat their health as some kind of horoscope.
The amount of times I’ve been online and misdiagnosed myself, man I don’t even know. Worst case was I convinced myself I had afib. Knew it, from all of my reading and everything I had all the symptoms.
Except I didn’t have them, because since I’ve never experienced the symptoms I thought I had the symptoms, but I did not.
The knowledge isn’t “gatekept”, it’s not something they hide away in a chest. It takes 10 years of medical school and several more after that of on the job training just to be a junior doctor. Talk about minimizing how complex the human body and all possible ailments are. We go to doctors not for the 15 minutes in the exam room with them, but because of the decades of knowledge they learned so we didn’t have to.
Anyone can become a doctor and learn the same knowledge, it’s just a lot of effort. No one is stopping you.
And amazingly it’s not a question of intelligence, but rather tenacity. It’s really a lot of time and work but most people could do it if they had the willingness and opportunity.
This is without a doubt the worst take I have ever read ever. All that knowledge is on the internet in ebooks by the way. Don’t want to go to the doctor? Learn.
You would trust random idiots on the internet to give you medical advice? How fucking stupid. People have died because of bad advice given on the internet, and you want to encourage this?
For every “miracle tip” there’s at least 10 fuckwits giving potentially dangerous advice.
So if you get in a horrible accident and lose a limb, make sure to ask the internet for advice as you bleed out. Don’t be a sucker for “big surgeon” and bow to authority.
It if your house burns down, ask a bunch of randos to help rebuild it. You don’t want to support that multi-billion-dollar construction industry.
Consider for a moment that most doctors actually know what they’re doing and the beef you have is with a dystopian society that’s figured out how to commodify basic needs to a point where we all need to “earn” our very existence.
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There could be so many miracle tips or tricks online
There aren’t. We call the tips and tricks that work medicine. And we train doctors and nurses and associated healthcare workers to know them or know who knows the tricks to refer people to them.
The guys discovering new tips and tricks that work will tell them to the doctors first, and not the internet, and are almost exclusively doctors themselves.
This stupid belief is literally what killed idiots injecting horse medicine without supervision during the last pandemic.
A therapist might be able to help you with your anxiety. You should consider making an appointment to talk to one.
As my favorite doctor sang, “It’s best to know the truth, for that I have no doubt”
Going to the internet is great for the best over the counter itch ointment, or all natural throat lozenges, but a persistent cough? That’s for sure 100% doctor territory. That’s not looking for cures or advice, that requires a diagnosis, which is scary, but what is more scary is not knowing. The saying is true, knowing is half the battle. Plus the longer it goes undiagnosed the worse it gets.
@OP, call your doctor, if you don’t have one just call a nearby clinic and tell them you’re a new patient. (You can either ask them or check with your insurance to see if they’re in-network). I deal with a lot of anxiety too, but part of life is learning how to live with it. Either by facing your fears or by talking to a professional, of which I’ve done both. A year ago I barely could get out of bed due to crippling anxiety and depression. I got up, I got help, and now I’m much much better. A disease won’t care how anxious you are, go see a doctor.
“I have had a dry cough for the past few months.” Can mean all sorts of things. Random speculation from somebody working off of very limited information can lead someone to try a “cure” that masks or exacerbates an otherwise treatable or eventually deadly condition.
There is a reason doctors have to go through so much school and gain so much experience before they become an “actual doctor”.
Do you have a 10cm mass in your right lung, or do you have allergies? A doctor visit can tell you if your cough can be treated with medication or surgery and chemo that you will die without.
I am not someone who likes to go to the doctor if I know that I can’t treat myself, but you can be damn sure I will not ask the internet if it is something I have no idea about.
I’d love it if healthcare was top of the line and free as air, but that is not the world we live in and people giving people medical advice with an unknown level of expertise and next to no empirical evidence of a diagnosis gets people killed or harmed. Let the information doctors have be freely available for people to use as they see fit for their personal use and all medication be cheap as dirt, but medical advice should only come from a licensed doctor that is qualified to practice medicine and not some stranger on the internet that barely has the experience and ability to treat a simple laceration.
“I have had a dry cough for the past few months.”
You have esophageal cancer. You’re welcome.
I looked up your symptoms online, and it says here you might have “internet connectivity issues”
I did! How’d you know?
One of the best Parks and Recreation lines of all time.
Thanks WebMD, you are the best. I guess I need to get some essential oils, acupuncture, and change my diet to 100% durian.
Also only drink water straight from a mineral spring source.
I know just the one down the hill from the chicken plant, thanks again!
Essential oils and “100% of x” diets are nonsense, but acupuncture has a good track record. I doubt you can find anything on WebMD seriously suggesting using either of the first two.
Acupuncture therapy is a Chinese parallel to chiropractic “medicine” in terms of efficacy compared to peer-reviewed modern medicine.
Studies have shown acupuncture to be roughly equal to phramacotherapy, but with multiple hours a week invested in relaxing immobile in a dimly lit room with soft music and a placebo bias to treat strain and stress ailments like migranes.
Every “treatment” I mentioned is equally bullshit ways to deal with anything a placebo can’t effectively treat. Go get stabbed in a strip mall and I don’t care how big the wound channel is, not my monkey and not my circus and I ain’t buying them peanuts from a clown.
Huh, after some poking around yeah, it doesn’t have the scientific support I thought it did. It seems to effect the nervous system and tissue beyond what can be explained by placebo… but not by much. At least it isn’t actually dangerous like chiropractors.
Depends on if the needles are clean.
Yes, the doctor went to school and rigorously studied medicine for years. They are not a “wizard” they are simply an expert with expert knowledge.
Random people on the Internet are not, which is why they tell eachother to drink horse dewormer and other stupid shit. It doesn’t matter how much some random layman thinks they know what’s wrong with you, they have no expertise to support that belief.
The idea that people should stop telling others to check with a doctor if they need medical advice is absurd.
It’s worse than that, even another doctor should not be diagnosing or advising people online…they don’t have access to your medical history, current medications, comorbidities, etc and all of that data is VITAL to giving sound medical advice.
Anything beyond “eat a variety of foods - not too much or too little, get enough sleep, and exercise within your comfort limits” without any of that additional information should be considered bad advice and there’s probably even cases where those 3 very general rules would be ill-advised.
they don’t have access to your medical history, current medications, comorbidities, etc and all of that data is VITAL to giving sound medical advice.
True, but also, some local public doctor hardly has time to do a deep dive into that with some 20min appointment instead of having a 30 second look into the brief the nurse you talked to jotted down, hap-hazardly
One can give advice without being too prescriptive, much like the example you gave. Some things are just good all around advice and such that they would practically never be harmful. Even your advice wouldn’t be good for some things. Broken bone? Nope. Diabetic coma, nope.
You’re describing a problem with the health care system, not the problem with doctors.
That being said, actually an unpopular and dangerous and stupid opinion. Upvoted.
Just like with “proof” of aliens or ghosts being presented on UFO and ghost hunting shows: if there really was a miracle cure to be found by talking to randos online, it would be major fucking news that wouldn’t be limited to hearing it first from JimboXX42069 on Facebook.
The things is, the stakes can be really high, even for something that seems benign. The people who give you medical advice based on a text post really are being irresponsible. Doctors are trained to ask the right questions and do the right tests. Sure, we might like it if we could just crowd source our diagnosis, but it’s a really, really bad idea for most things.
See a doctor? In this economy? Yeah fuckin right
If you feel sick talk to your doctor. Internet “knowledge” doesn’t work in case on medical issues. So called tips and tricks may work for a person who posted it but it could be dangerous for you. If calling a stranger (in this case a doctor’s office) invokes anxiety, talk to a therapist.
I’m onboard with this statement purely because nobody is posting asking for advice while sitting around just fucking oblivious to the idea that doctors exist. Like we arent aware that the best advice will come from a trained medical professional who has my complete medical history and access to all manner of tests to confirm their diagnosis.
Saying “Speak to your doctor” is useless, its just you involving yourself in the conversation for the sake of it. Its the advice equivalent of “Thoughts and Prayers”. Do you also go on a automotive community and reply to every car repair advice question with “take it to a mechanic”?
For me, "Speak to “your doctor” means getting an appointment for 10 weeks from now OR taking the first available appointment (11am next tuesday, so… take a day off work) at the revolving door medical clinic staffed by doctors who legit have a “patients per hour” quota to keep and you never see the same one twice. Who skimreads 40 years of medical history, pays no heed to what I actually want and pushes me out the door.
Actually a great many people honestly believe they know better than doctors, that their snake oil will fix them. Look at the entire antivax movement. Look at the pandemic deniers.
So, uh, we can’t take it for granted that people actually know that they should talk to a trained professional. Because many don’t.
And that’s important. If we find out that we’re talking to a certain kind of fundie or antivaxxer or COVID denier, depending on the context of course, often there’s no point wasting time. Get the good advice on paper in hopes that other readers see it, and move along with life.
What people DO with advice they asked for is on them.
I was having issues with positional hypertension, I posted about it in a bodybuilding forum. Someone said “I bet your caffeine intake is too high. I had the same issue after my morning coffees and whenever I had preworkout. Dial back the caf and see what happens” That advice was safe, free and easy to test. It worked too. The thread has a bunch of people saying “Go see a doctor” and a bunch of people recommending supplements to help. I looked at what I asked rationally and thought about it.
I think the type of people who will.apply internet quackery as fact are probably the same people who put “doctors” in inverted commas and shop for the opinion they want anyway.
Yeah I largely agree with you. If I think that OP (of whatever topic) is not going to be receptive to reasonable advice, clearly I don’t want to waste my time, but I might spend just enough time to get good information out there so that other readers can see it.
I’m onboard with this statement purely because nobody is posting asking for advice while sitting around just fucking oblivious to the idea that doctors exist.
That doesn’t mean this is the right course of action. A doctor will actually examine you rather than just listening to your explanation of things that may or may not be relevant. The point isn’t that people don’t know doctors exist, it’s that they want to find the cheapest route rather than spend the money to see one in addition to the fact that you have zero idea who the person you’re talking to is.
Asking for medical advice online is no different than asking a magic 8-ball.
what if they can’t spend the money?? just suffer? someone who’s suffering from the same thing as me is frankly someone i respect more than a normal successful guy who went to school for 20 years
If asking online cures your illness then you probably didn’t need to go to the doctor in the first place and you never know if someone is truly suffering from the same thing as you since so many illnesses have overlapping symptoms. Remember it wasn’t too long ago that people online were recommending bleach and horse dewormer to cure COVID. Is that the type of advice you’re looking for?
You’re angry at the (I’m guessing) US healthcare system. I get it. It sucks. But that anger is woefully misplaced going against doctors or random people on the internet. The doctor that treats your ailment is not responsible for how much the clinic, the hospital or insurance charges you. But they will always be on your side and give you advice that they are sure will work and will help you get better.
People on the internet however, a few of them will give you advice that kills you or cause permanent harm without even an inch of remorse. They’ll frame it as medical advice as well. Often without even recognizing that what they’re doing is harmful. The internet has told little kids to chew on detergent pods, drink bleach, people with COVID to do bleach enemas and horse dewormer, told psychiatric patients to stop taking their medications (leading to accidents and suicides), caused ear infections with recipes for extraneous concoctions for tinnitus, and the list goes on.
The vast majority of the people on the internet do not want to be responsible for stuff like the ones above, so we tell people asking for advice to go see a doctor. If it’s so much trouble, there are alternatives, asks for a friend to help you call and set up the appointment, they can come with you into consultation if you feel unsafe. You rely so much on the internet, make a gofundme or some similar donations page and get people to help you pay for the doctor. Hell I would rather help you with that, than give you potentially bad advice. The point is, “go to the doctor” doesn’t come from a place of malice, quite the contrary, it comes from a place of care.
And finally, yes, the guy who went to school for 20 years knows more than the one guy who is suffering the same thing as you. Because, the one guy who suffers the same symptoms as you has very intimate experience with one body and one expression of the disease. Without even considering the fact that you have to find that one guy in the sea of million of users who have no idea what they’re talking about. However, the guy who went to school has direct experience with thousands of bodies who have had the same disease, and indirect experience with millions of bodies that have been documented with the same disease in scientific and practice journals. He has seen your symptoms not once, but expressing in a million different ways, in a million lifestyles, treated with thousand different ways with control for hundreds of possible variables. He knows what works and what doesn’t and can adapt his advice to your specific body, lifestyle and circumstances in ways that a random on the internet simply cannot.
If people want to blindly apply the advice, do no followup or apply any kind of common sense to the answers thats on them.
Theres no folk remedy OR prescription for fucking stupid.
Your last sentence explains perfectly why people say “see your doctor”.
Nobody wants to participate in some idiot hurting themselves because they don’t have the ability to apply common sense in the first place.
People that ask for “tips and tricks” regarding healthcare also can’t fathom how incredibly complex modern medicine can be.
Even if you think “talk to a doctor” is useless, misinformation is still actively harmful. So giving advice is worse than useless. It’s not a “something is better than nothing” scenario.
it’s not automatically misinformation because it’s advice
There’s no way to know without a medical expert, and the liklihood of it being misinformation is high given people’s penchant for offering advice they know nothing about.
Don’t ask strangers on the internet for medical advice.
thank you, this is exactly what i mean. the problem shouldn’t be, as the comments are saying, ‘stupid people will do the horse injections’ – it’s pretty obvious when the tips are common sense and benign yet clever and helpful – like taking a bath if you’re stressed. it’s just such a preachy, syrupy empty message to shut off everyone else from saying anything because you need to repeat the boring disclaimer we’ve heard 1000 times. it’s so smug, i’ve never seen such smugness resonate off of plain text before.
it’s not “dangerous” to read people’s advice online, my god, you can get all sorts of horrible advice about relationships or sex or professional life or tech support or anything else you can think of, but medical advice – something that could be the most crucial thing you need in an emergency, if you have one of the many, many situations it’s not trivial to talk to a doctor – that’s where we draw the line and leave it to the esteemed doctor class, only they may know the secrets. why can’t people talk to fellow people about their health without getting yelled at that they should, nay, they MUST speak to a medical professional. we are not allowed to discuss the hippocratic realm
I replied this to someone else but…
I was having issues with positional hypertension, I posted about it in a bodybuilding forum. Someone said “I bet your caffeine intake is too high. I had the same issue after my morning coffees and whenever I had preworkout. Dial back the caf and see what happens” That advice was safe, free and easy to test. It worked too. The thread has a bunch of people saying “Go see a doctor” and a bunch of people recommending supplements to help. I looked at all the advice rationally and thought about it. Id never had issues with caffeine before, but Id also never been working out as hard as I was and in a caloric deficit at the same time.
I have a couple fairly serious chronic conditions and discuss them with a wide variety of people online. Sometimes it’s apparent that the knowledge level of someone asking a question is just way too much to be filled in with a reddit comment, and the consequences of them getting it wrong could be very dangerous or fatal - for instance, discussing insulin dosage. Some people rely on their doctor for every adjustment, while others have experience and knowledge and feel comfortable making their own changes to ratios or basal dosage. If someone sounds sorta of clueless I sure as hell am not going to tell them to adjust their dosage in a way that could land them in a hospital or kill their kid or something and at those times, the best advice is “you should probably ask your doctor”.
Sorry that you’re going through something OP. Everything I say after this is probably something you don’t want to hear, so read on at your peril.
The reason people tell you to go to your doctor when you ask for medical advice online is because the question itself implies you want good or useful advice and nobody besides you’re medical team can give you that. You can find some general stuff online or ask to speak to a different doctor if there’s trust issues with your current provider, but nobody without access to your personal medical history is able to advise you accurately. It takes at least 8 years of constant study to be a newbie doctor. Human bodies are extremely complex, and we still don’t know how everything works. Even if we did, not all bodies work the same way. On top of that, humans are shit at statistics, and we heavily bias anecdotal evidence, especially when it is our own anecdote or from someone we know.
Here’s a simple example.
Say I get an upset stomach after eating meals and I complain about it to a friend. Trying to be helpful, they told me they used to get that too, so they tried switching to a vegetarian diet, and they got better. Sounds innocent enough, right? I know what vegetarian means (it’s “common sense”, right?) so I stop eating meat and start getting salads or fruit for lunch instead. After about a week, I fell asleep while driving home. Turns out, I’m anemic. I was getting just enough iron on my old diet to keep the worst symptoms that would have scared me enough to see a doctor at bay, but when I cut out meat I went from iron deficient to anemic. Had I gone to the doctor, they’d have easily seen my iron deficiency and put me on a supplement or advised me how to change my diet, and the nausea would have gone away. Instead, I end up imaking my condition worse and landing in the ER after an auto crash.
That didn’t actually happen, but I think it’s a good example for several reasons. It’s a common side effect (nausea) of a common problem (iron deficiency) that you’re likely to think doesn’t warrant a doctor, but you’d still mention to a friend. It’s a super common symptom associated with lots of conditions. The friend even gave good advice (for most people, changing their diet wouldn’t have been an issue, but because of an underlying medical condition specific to our protagonist, it was bad advice FOR THEM). The friend had no way of knowing or even suspecting it could be dangerous advice because most people don’t spend a decade learning about the body and disease more generally and they didn’t know about the specific issues related to the specific case. It’s the same reason you shouldn’t get legal advice online… It’s a super complex system, and every case is literally different.
Man, this occur really an opinion, it’s a rant.
Which is fine, I guess, but it means you won’t get useful responses for the most part.
Here’s the thing though. You can’t crowd source medical advice. Well, you can, but doing so is an idiot’s bet. You might get lucky and get good advice, but chances are it’ll range from useless to possibly risky/dangerous.
It’s hard enough to diagnose when you have a solid patient history and a good intake interview. Going from there to prescribing is another set of evaluations to get the most results with the least side effects.
And you sure as fuck need to give plenty of disclaimers if you do give advice so that some idiot doesn’t follow it without thinking it through.
Me? Idgaf about liability because I won’t give advice without a shit ton of disclaimers, and outright telling the person they shouldn’t take the advice.
But I agree with you. If you aren’t going to do something useful, just scroll on. No need to waste anyone’s time with the bullshit.
there are a great deal of people who don’t go to the doctor even if they should until it’s too late. i have people like that in my family. repeating to them they should go can actually prevent disability or death.
therefore i think you should both, give advice, if you have any, and remind them to go to the doctor.
I gave myself the 2 week rule with my own hypochondria and anxiety. If something lasts for more than 2 weeks, it’s officially time to get over myself and go talk to someone. If I get a random ache I can never tell is this me getting older, or is this something serious. Very unlikely 2 weeks will be enough to kill me, so I make a mental note of when I started feeling a certain way. If it’s happening after 2 weeks, it’s usually time to see a doctor. Most things go away and I completely forget about. The other ones the doctor usually agrees in it was time for me to come in. Last one was simple heart burn, but it lasted so long, they told me it was good to come in, put me on some simple stuff, it was gone relatively quickly.
