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Does Wikipedia get an unfair press?

#43
spade2you said:
If you get your info on teh interw3b, it's only valid for interw3b debates. A lot of the info is extremely biased and not particularly well researched. The info regarding politics is pretty sad. Then again, I believe in accuracy, not spins to get my point across. Still, it's funny when people try to attack my medical info when I have a fer real PhD and they graduated from Google University. ;)
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One day, a few years ago, my wife had an adverse reaction to an anti-epilepsy drug her doctor had just switched her to. It was necessary to take her to the emergency room and the doctor on call didn't know what caused the reaction but suggested that maybe she was dehydrated and told us to see her regular doctor. The next day, her doctor told us that it was a nutritional problem and had us modify her diet. We went home and I looked up the drug that she was on and listed number one for adverse side effects was the specific reaction that she was having. It said it was common for that drug when prescribed for persons who had certain characteristics that my wife had. The doctor didn't know this about the drug or didn't care but he agreed to switch medications and the problem immediately went away.

This sort of thing is common.
 
#44
hbarcat said:
One day, a few years ago, my wife had an adverse reaction to an anti-epilepsy drug her doctor had just switched her to. It was necessary to take her to the emergency room and the doctor on call didn't know what caused the reaction but suggested that maybe she was dehydrated and told us to see her regular doctor. The next day, her doctor told us that it was a nutritional problem and had us modify her diet. We went home and I looked up the drug that she was on and listed number one for adverse side effects was the specific reaction that she was having. It said it was common for that drug when prescribed for persons who had certain characteristics that my wife had. The doctor didn't know this about the drug or didn't care but he agreed to switch medications and the problem immediately went away.

This sort of thing is common.
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This is precisely the reason why Wiki is useful.
 
#45
Jerose said:
Wikipedia is a good tool to FIND sources, as many well written pages on the site are linked to real articles that you CAN use in papers. If you find info you want to use, look for it's source in the footnotes and go to the web page it originally came from. Check the validity of that web page to see if its a legitimate source and bingo, you've used Wikipedia to find real information.
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Oh man thank you, that really is the point of wiki I think. You cannot do a complete research using wiki, but you can easily get it to have a general idea of what X subject is or look at the references to get further info that are usable for papers. That's what encyclopedias do.
 
#49
spade2you said:
Because a doctor was lazy and didn't do his homework?
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All my life I've seen dermatologists for the medium-severe eczema I get on my feet, hands and arms. I've had it diagnosed as fungus, psiriosis and even scabies before, and even after it was (finally) diagnosed as eczema, none of them could tell me what caused it or what it even meant other than I had it and then they prescribed steroids because normal anti-eczema medications weren't working.

Two minutes on wikipedia told me what kind of eczema I had (its rather rare), how common it was, common remedies and medications, all possible causes (and combinations of causes), and all pertinent information a lifetime of seeing dermatologists didn't give me. But of course, none of that information is valid because it came from wikipedia, as academia will have us believe. :rollno:
 
#51
Fassa Albrecht said:
No, because it's accessible in cases like this. What's easier to do-trawl shedloads of medical sites with some highly technical language involved, or go onto Wikipedia where things are clearly explained and laid out?
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The material is complicated because medicine is complicated. I have no difficulty interpreting the info. Being unable to interpret the info is just as bad as getting the wrong information. This is the reason that the training and credentialing is so strict. In a pros vs. Joes competition, there is no competition.

HaVIC5 said:
But of course, none of that information is valid because it came from wikipedia, as academia will have us believe. :rollno:
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Again, just because your MD didn't get it correct doesn't mean that our info isn't top notch. Glad it worked for ya, but I've seen some pretty lame and unproven claims. My info isn't necessarily perfect or won't work for everyone, but any info is tested and regulated, which you simply will never be able to say about Wiki.
 

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