[atahanacar]

Medical doctor here. Please don't get health advice from hn comments. As a matter of fact, I advice against reading anything about health on hn, as the risks of dangerous misinformation far outweigh any useful information you might learn here.

[Bender]

Principal Armchair Commander here. I second this. That said I also avoid health advice from professionals. I have too often found their incentives to be in conflict with my well being. I just do my own research and ignore everyone, especially AI.

[atahanacar]

I assume you are American? I find it sad that a doctor has any incentive other than providing their patients with the best care possible.

[Bender]

I assume you are American?

Was it that obvious? It would be cool if I could have a theme song. [1] and yeah I don't know how to fix the US health care system.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVkTmnJkAN8&list=PLxUfU-CW9j...

[acheron]

It’s always great when years of medical and scientific studies are instantly debunked by HN’s top JavaScript developers. One wonders why we even bother having research universities.

[annzabelle]

There was a thread that touched on lyme disease recently, and there were a ridiculous number of comments going down pseudoscientific rabbit holes about people who'd somehow gotten chronic lyme in places with no endemic lyme disease and that the only ways to fix this were chronic antibiotics and hyperthermia chambers.

HN often suffers from the trait of people who are really bright in one area assuming that that means they are really knowledgeable in areas they don't know much about.

[atahanacar]

That is relatively benign compared to what I've seen before. I normally refrain from repeating misinformation, even for debunking it but I will make an exception (or two). I've seen comments ranging from "salt intake doesn't increase blood pressure because you pee what you don't need" to "blood glucose levels aren't good for diagnosing diabetes".

Edit: OK, that's not really a "range". I have no idea why I phrased it like that. Both are very dangerous statements that can be life threatening if the wrong person believes it. I just hope that comment didn't cause any diabetic ketoacidosis cases.

[cup]

Do you think people seeking medical advice from HN comments might be related to their disatisfaction from the suppor they receive from medical clinicians?

[atahanacar]

Yes and no. Some are just way overconfident in their knowledge of medicine and human body, while it is miniscule compared to the average physician's. Medicine is a field much larger than people realize. It is easy to think you know a lot when you don't even know how much you are missing.

Having a reason doesn't make it any less dangerous though.

[pixel_popping]

I can't fully agree with avoiding the topic altogether. Yes, people need to be careful, but building real knowledge in complex subjects like health generally requires engaging continuously (same as in Computer science) with research and studies (and learning to evaluate them critically) AND gathering people' opinions and perspectives (very important, after all, the experience of an MD grows over time because of reports of side-effects from your own patient, which is close), rather than shutting out discussion entirely, even for yourself who is already an MD. Also not everyone had the opportunity or desire to study medicine formally but still want a chance to be able to understand it in greater depth, and one great way to learn is to read a ton.

We can also relate that some drugs (albeit most are illegal but whatever, it doesn't invalidate them) from recreational to bodybuilding drugs are practically only massively "studied" by the bro-science community and many topic about harm reduction and so-on stems from there, enormous amount of people have started getting interested into health, supplements... due to reading about it randomly from people.

Although, in practice, you are partially right, it also does damage because many people will just take it as face value and just don't have enough expertise yet to do a proper reasoning around some takes and might not check if it's factual.

[kev009]

Halp us docter