[speeder]

In my personal experience... you are wrong. I mean, the part about knowing better than someone that works with something.

People working in some fields often suffer the "It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It"

Example: I have Hashimoto's Disease. All endocrinologists I went to, wouldn't help me, some of them burned a lot of my money trying to prove I had diabetes or other disease that could lead to expensive treatment (one insisted I had cancer, despite every test for cancer she asked for, returning negative). In the end to get treatment I got help from an Ophthalmologist, that even explained to me some things I didn't knew about the disease.

Example 2: when I was having some mental issues, all psychiatrists kept giving me random meds that were recently patented and expensive, and refused to let me get Ritalin, that was cheap because generic version of it exists. In the end the solution was ritalin. To get the ritalin I went to a psychiatrist that inherited lots of wealth and focused treating poor people, I suspect that psychiatrist in particular is the only one not getting dinners, parties and other "marketing events" from manufacturers. (I also in one point of my career worked in a software company that one project was make an app for the pharma client sales team track all the "gifts" given to doctors...)

[nabla9]

Thank you for sharing your personal experience. Unfortunately sharing personal stories like this in the internet is the source of much grief for three reasons:

1) There is no way to quantify how likely this is from personal stories. If your experience is 1 in 100 event, you are doing more harm sharing it than not sharing it if 1 in 10 becomes too suspicious to follow diagnosis.

2) We really don't know. Either things happened as people say, or they doctor shopped until received a misdiagnosis and mismedication they wanted.

3) Readers can't use your example in their personal life because they are different. They may read what you said and go doctor shopping and googling until they are misdiagnosed and mismedicated.

You should not blindly trust doctors, and get second opinion of things seem wrong, but sharing medical stories in the internet is misses the information needed for it to be usable.

[NhanH]

So “lived experience” matters until it is against the dogma.

Sharing personal story likes this is the reason the internet being a wonderful place. It should always be recommended as long as it is truthful, and doesn’t involve explicit agenda of spamming out other experience or information.

[nabla9]

That's not what I said.

> It should always be recommended as long as it is truthful,

That's the point. You never know.

[NhanH]

Your argument makes no sense unless you are claiming the GP is lying.

The sharer should always be truthful. But also the reader should assume things might not be as it seems, trying to verify it on their own. But that is different than recommending everyone to not share anything.

There are two separate recommendations to be made: one for the writer, and one for the reader.

[dennis_jeeves1]

So indirectly what you're saying is protect the masses from 'misinformation'. The masses are too stupid to think for themselves, correct?