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Clarity comments on Open Thread Feb 22 - Feb 28, 2016 - Less Wrong
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What do you think is the relative advantage of LessWrong in nutritional advice for a specific medical problem over generic net info or your doctor? Not criticizing the choice, this isn't a rhetorical question and I might have done something similar, I'm genuinely curious.
The signal to noise ratio on some advice topics is absurdly bad on the internet overall for vitamins/minerals and general health topics (exercise, diet, etc.). A few people around here have actually made the effort to study them in-depth and have gotten much better information than would be readily available otherwise. I'm primarily thinking of Scott's wheat, fish, and Vitamin D posts at this point, though I've seen others around here in the past.
The relative advantage of LessWrong is that it is free, and contains many smart people with variable knowledge bases. There is no reason to believe that it will always (or often) be better than your doctor, but there very little cost to asking and the potential gain outweighs the minimal cost.
Scott Alexander wrote a long post about how his clinic fails to stock Melatonin because there's no drug reps encouraging them to stock any Melatonin.
If you ask most doctors for Vitamin D3 supplementation I don't think they give the correct answer of 2000+ UI per day taken in the morning.
People on LW might be both better at reading studies and evaluating the statistics and have spend more time researching a particular issue than the average doctor.
As was pointed out to me recently; (general practitioner) doctors are v̶e̶r̶y̶ good at general health;
specialists are very good at specific medicines; but if you want to spend 200 hours reading up everything about one molecule you can probably overtake their knowledge.
What does "general health" mean? Doctors are not good at keeping people healthy and each failure of health is specific, not "general".
A General Practitioner doctor deals with all health ailments. as a consequence they are not trained to be experts in all health ailments; they are trained in the first steps of dealing with all ailments (which is a difficult endeavour).
I made up the 200 hour figure, but if you consider one subject for one semester of university is expected to cost 150-250 hours depending on the details. Let's say I underestimated 200 and actually it's more like 4-500 hours reading up and understanding everything about one molecule to overtake the knowledge of health professionals.
That's a defense for the claim that doctors aren't experts at everything. It's not evidence for that claim that doctors are very good at general health.
alright; I can wear that. I think I meant to say; "general practitioner doctors are very not good at oddly specific health" have adjusted the post above. Did not mean to make that claim.
"General health" is a health intervention which would, if followed, mean that a relatively large number of patients' lives would be improved over how they are now.
8-0 I am more confused...