[WikiEN-l] Health advice from the web

[David Goodman]

People are always going to mistreat and misdiagnose; let them at least
have correct information, which is more likely to guide them right
than incomplete information. Not doing this when in one's power is as
immoral as telling deliberate lies.

Considering only public information for now, I think there are no
exceptions at all to the requirement to give full information in all
cases and all subjects, except for young children, and except for
information intended to specifically & unjustly harm a private
individual. I mean it quite literally, essentially following JS Mill.
For those who do think we have a responsibility not to tell the public
what they might use improperly,  I remind them, first, that this is
the explanation used for all censorship--censorship is the classic
valid example of a slippery slope. And second, that this is
information the governments of the English-speaking countries not only
permit but require to be publicly available, and that is in fact
widely available. We are not breaking new ground here.

In any case, I cannot see how standard drug dosage information is more
harmful than any other facet of medicine.


David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG



On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 12:11 AM, Ben Kovitz<bkovitz at acm.org> wrote:
> David Goodman wrote:
>
>> this is information that essentially
>> everyone in the world considers basic reference information, that is
>> available in authoritative form for all the english speaking countries
>> (slightly different in each), and could easily be adding with
>> absolutely impeccable official references, but which the medicine
>> wikiproject refuses to add.
>>
>> why? people might misinterpret it; we shouldn't tell people how to
>> treat illnesses, this is the role of physicians, it's different in
>> different countries, it changes frequently, there are all sort of
>> special considerations, and so on. (The arguments against each should
>> be obvious: we tell people everything else about treating the
>> illnesses, physicians should not hold a monopoly of medical care, we
>> can easily give the different approved dosages just as we give the
>> different drug names, everything else relative to medicine changes
>> also & we update the encyclopedia, everyone understands that there are
>> exceptions  as with everything else in the world.)
>
> Would it accurate to say that the main concern is blame-avoidance?
>
> That is, giving out certain kinds of information carries legal or
> ethical responsibility, because people will take important action
> based on that information.  Legal and medical information are the
> classic examples.
>
> However, the great strength of Wikipedia is its approach of "better to
> make errors and let people fix them than to get nowhere by trying to
> prevent errors before they happen".  That's how Wikipedia grew, and it
> goes head on against the arguments you mentioned above.  It's a
> strange thing for Wikipedians to oppose including a certain broad
> category of information, which everyone agrees is valuable and
> noteworthy, simply because errors and misinterpretations are possible.
>
> Now, medical information is particularly prone to a certain kind of
> dangerous misinterpretation.  Naïve readers want simple claims they
> can rely on, like "X cures Y".  The reality is that drugs always have
> trade-offs, and there's enough variation among people that treatments
> affect different people in different ways.  Naïve readers are prone to
> lift statements out of context or simplify them dangerously:
> "Wikipedia said X cures Y, but all I got was hives!" when actually the
> text said, "X cures Y in 60% of people, and it causes hives in 0.2% of
> people"--perhaps in a big table, mixed in with lots of other
> information.  On top of that, those numbers are usually statistical
> extrapolations, open to debate, and the medical consensus is always
> shifting, and there is always dissent.
>
> Maybe the folks here can brainstorm a way around this.  Can you tell a
> few specific bits of information, say, about just one specific drug,
> that would be nice to include, but that raise the blame-related
> objections?
>
> (Or, if I've got the underlying concern wrong, please post about that.)
>
> Ben
>
>
>
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