This week, I proudly inaugurate Dubitatio's latest foray into blogging: the use of polemic statements that then proceeds to use fewer than 500 words to initiate a discussion into the topic as a whole. Enjoy!
Statement: “There are now many different kinds of internet sites and apps offering medical advice, but they all share one thing in common: they do more harm than good.”
The statement above attempts to argue that all internet sites disseminate information to the public that only succeeds in achieving more harm than good. Internet sites may do this by promoting the use of certain techniques to ‘cure’ illnesses that only a trained medical professional should undertake or those that have no practical value at all. A case in point of this would be the technique of ear candles to remove earwax. Not only has this technique increased incidences of third-degree and second-degree burns, it has also lulled people into a false sense of security that their earwax has been removed; as a result, they do not seek the desired treatment for earwax removal quickly enough and when they do visit the doctor because of harm caused by the above procedure, an unnecessary strain is put on the healthcare system that a utilitarianist medical professional would argue could have been spent elsewhere.
On the contrary, some opponents of the proposition above would argue that internet sites offering medical advice like “WebMD” and “Mayo Clinic” help relieve the strain on the healthcare system by hypochondriacs who would otherwise swarm clinics with symptoms that amount to nothing. Furthermore, medical sites like “Yahoo! Health” that offer preventative medicine advice like eating healthy and first-aid medical sites like that from the “American Health Association” prevent people from getting sick in the first place or prevent trivial conditions from developing into serious maladies. In addition to the above, internet sites aid in the medical pillar of “providing all available information” as patients can read about the recommended medical procedure to formulate their own decision of wanting to undertake the medical procedure.
In conclusion, I am of the firm opinion that that whether medical sites do more harm than good is a statement that must not be generalised to all medical services. Yes, there may be sites recommending dubious procedures, but there must be enough faith placed on the public that they are able to recognize the dubiousness of such procedures and refuse to follow them.
What do you think? Please let me know your opinion by answering the poll on the side: Question Everything!
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