Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Discussion Question
I think the doctor telling the patient to not look to the internet for research on her illness was the best strategy for her. There are a lot of sites out there that people create of their opinions and not based on facts. There are high hoping people that give false hope of treatments and cures that do not exist or have not been proven yet. There are also nay sayers that would go on and on about how bad the illness is and how there is no hope for sufferers. Neither one of these would be good for the patient to read. The book shows that Kate's top results showed a webpage of a cure that is not true. Not everyone knows how to properly validate a website and even if they do, some websites are very misleading and can be hard for anyone to validate. People can be pretty convincing. The book gives a good example of how to avoid this. If warned ahead of time, the patient can narrow her results by excluding ones that include selling cures. A safe extension to use is .gov because only government agencies can purchase them. It would be better not to go to the internet at all, but if the patient wants to they need to know how to correctly and precisely validate a website and look past ones that sell cures.
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I would agree with you some what. I believe the doctor should have told the patient what things to believe on the internet and what she avoid. When you tell someone not to do something their reaction is to do that thing you told them not to do. So even if the doctor tells her not to look online, she probably will anyway, which is why I believe the doctor should have told her what websites to trust and what not to trust, by giving her an idea, she would have avoided getting her hopes up.
ReplyDeleteI understand what your point is but I disagree. I am one of those people that when it comes to getting sick I will refer to the internet. I use medical sites such as web md and mayo clinic. It usually does work out well. I feel that the patient should've been allowed to research the internet as long as she was aware that there is false information on the internet. I mean people who research the internet should be aware that not everything on the internet is true. Even when I use the sites I said above I still double check and most the time I will go to a doctor back at my home town to double check that I diagnosed myself correctly while at school. Again, I totally see where you are coming from but I probably would've allowed her to use the internet to research her medical issue if I was the doctor.
ReplyDeleteI agree. There is so much information on the internet that can be detrimental to the patient and the way they feel about the illness. I would have taken the doctors orders and not researched it on the internet if he had strictly said not to. I also agree that when looking up this information, there are many people who are out there just saying how bad it is and to someone with a serious medical condition as hers than this false information or bias information can have large repercussions.
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