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Sick Day On The Internet
Author : Margarit Johnson
Submitted : 2010-11-27 18:38:04 Word Count : 775 Popularity: 29
Tags: local seo, seo, search engine placement, search engine rankings
Today I'm sick, and it is the sole thing on my mind, so let's talk about health and the Internet. I do not mean "don't sit too close to your monitor" or "make sure your keyboard and mouse setup can be ergonomic" or any of the additional helpful tips to maintaining good health while choosing to use the computer system. No, I mean the specific intersection of the Internet as well as your health: medical conditions that only exist on the Internet and in the minds of the people discussing them.
Where the Nigerian banker emails, overpayment hoaxes, and discount prescription medication scams have gone before, so too go the medical information scams. In particular, there are actually two diseases which are discussed quite a bit online, but that you'll never hear diagnosed by a doctor nor read about in a medical journal. Actually, you can appear them discussed in a medical journal, but only for the purpose of debunking them: neither of these diseases can be real.
Both "Wilson's temperature fatigue" and "adrenal fatigue" can be terms applied to general collections of vague symptoms, any of that you could chalk up to everyday activities experienced by absolutely everybody. Do you need coffee to get through your day, and have a sweet tooth? According to proponents of adrenal fatigue, you're probably suffering from that disease without realizing it. Wilson's temperature fatigue, identified primarily through a relatively low body temperature, was supposedly identified by a a doctor in Florida who promotes a product specifically designed to counteract this syndrome. Unsurprisingly, this product is not recommended by any other doctors or medical associations, and it's not covered by any manner of insurance.
Just because these types of diseases don't really exist does not mean that people necessarily accept that as fact. Try telling anyone in the pro-"adrenal fatigue" community that their disease is fake and you'll be angrily rebuffed, met with claims that research organizations and foundations want to minimize the disease for some conspiratorial reason.
Why would anyone do this? Look at the symptoms, and the answer is both simple and unfortunate. These people start out feeling pretty poorly and aren't getting any real advice from their doctors beyond basic diet regulation and exercise, so they turn to the Internet for a second opinion. Pretty soon they discover that there's a whole community of folks just like them, all with the same experience regarding the professional medical field. They aren't alone anymore. Between this and the hope that this terrible feeling is something for that they can just take some medicine and make it go away, they desperately do not want this to be fake, although they might not recognize that on a conscious level. Anyone who gainsays them not only damages the foundation of their community however also threatens their hope for a cure, so the gainsayer must be wrong.
These are far from the sole diseases allegedly marginalized by the mainstream community and vastly self-diagnosed on the Internet, but they're the sole ones that have roughly zero basis in medical science. One additional syndrome that's commonly self-diagnosed online is Asperger's syndrome, that is characterized primarily by difficulty in social interaction and obsession with specific interests to the exclusion of others. While a handful of of all those self-diagnosing on the Internet as Asperger's sufferers have legitimate claims, many others claim the syndrome without any evidence save for social awkwardness. Unfortunately for legitimate Asperger's sufferers, these types of false claimants would rather have something to blame for their poor ability to socially interact; after all, if it's a medical condition it can't be their fault.
This really is just the tip of the iceberg, of course. Morgellons syndrome, somatoform disorder, and a great deal of other diseases and syndromes contain a nugget of truth under a mountain of Internet self-diagnosis. This is to say virtually nothing of the vast number of conditions that can be misdiagnosed due to user error on sites like WebMD. The bottom line here is that if you don't feel well and you think it can be more serious than your average cold or whatnot, go and see your doctor and if you do not agree with what he says then get your second opinion from another doctor. Just don't rely on online sources when you could deal with trained professionals.
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