On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 2:12 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 27 July 2010 11:56, Amir E. Aharoni
<amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
A friend of mine woke up in the middle of the
night with a belly-ache.
He googled it (in Hebrew) and the first result was the Hebrew
Wikipedia article about appendicitis. The symptoms matched, so he went
to the hospital and it indeed was appendicitis.
Wikipedia may have saved his life and this story may make a good
testimonial video - but are we sure that we would want to do it in the
light of [[Wikipedia:Medical disclaimer]]?
I'm not at all sure we should. We shouldn't be encouraging people to
diagnose themselves using Wikipedia. What if your friend had found the
article on indigestion and found that his symptoms seemed to match
(the symptoms can be pretty similar) so just went back to bed?
He would almost certainly have been woken up by the excruciating pain
and gone to hospital (and not told anyone the story about how he
mis-diagnosed himself using Wikipedia). I would hope it is rare that
people suffer the pain long enough for the appendix to burst. I agree,
though, that medical self-diagnosis stories are not a good idea for
the fundraiser.
Carcharoth