And maybe they’re not all that unreliable. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine (as reported last fall by the BBC and the Daily Mail) found that a Google search correctly diagnosed diseases 58% of the time. Considering the fact that doctors only correctly diagnose fatal illnesses 80% of the time (according to the Mail), that’s something worth thinking about.

The advanced body mods are often hooked up online as well, for the anonymity and the research. Also for sharing. Personally I’m all for the guy with the scalpel having read all he can from every source he can find and THEN making a decision. Just like I prefer my tattoo artist to know where her inks are from and what is in them. The core of Web 2.0 and the body mod community is information sharing and making it mean something. Web 2.0 kinda stops there though, whereas body mods go a bit further.

Also, I thought you might like this.

I also think the average person may have a level of experience or expertise that acedemics are either unaware of or intimidated by… just because someone posted it online, doesn’t automatically make it crap. Which is what some of my professors would say. If you’re looking for information on mailart, sheep breeding or bagpiping the experts may very well be found online, not in any academic institution.

Wikipedia isn’t the devil as so many instructors think. It is what it is, information deposited by all kinds of people, some of it’s good some of it’s not. I wouldn’t cite it for a paper, but if you want to learn to play bunko- what’s wrong with Wikipedia?

I think evaluation is a key skill in our current society.

Some people say this is an awful thing, some people say it’s a good thing—to me, the smartest people say, it IS a thing, like it or not, and the public health goal is to help people improve the medical research they are doing on their own, and to get doctors and patients interacting better in this new information environment. Rather than attempt some futile war to get patients to stop doing this. (Just trust everything the doctor says? No thanks. I’ve had too many run-ins with bad doctors. And I’m a fairly wealthy white male!)

There is indeed an analogy here.

You have to really be banking on me having the time or mental capacity to remember that there is a second part.

This in its itself is a very telling action.