I don't think it's a tangent at all, thanks for writing up such an in-depth response! I didn't mean for my comment to suggest that doctors are bad at their jobs or that they should simply diagnose better. I'm well aware (well, to the extent a layman could be) of the difficulties involved in diagnosing, and I can appreciate why doctors need so much intensive training to be able to do it well. I took issue with the BBC's article because I think it really misses the point about what Wikipedia is for and why it's important. Any doctor's opinion is only as good as the amount of time they dedicated to examining the patient and how current their knowledge is. Even after decades of practice and training, a doctor remains just one person with all the potential failures that come with that. So I think it's dangerous for people to think in terms of "trust your doctor" when a better attitude might be "give your doctor's opinion the weight it deserves given his training." Rather than discussing the overall accuracy of Wikipedia's content, the article focuses on, in my opinion, a bunk statistic. It measures the percent of articles which have an error. That doesn't really provide a good picture of Wikipedia's trustworthiness overall. The best that can be said for that kind of statistic is that "there are errors, so be cautious." The thing is, the same can be said for any conversation with your doctor, or with really any expert opinion. We need to be cautious with all sources of information, because they are all error-prone to varying degrees. When we reduce the information source to a single person (ie: "trust your doctor"), the possibility for error is at its highest. It's always better to combine multiple sources of information to create a more complete picture, and that's where I think Wikipedia is immensely valuable. If a patient sees their doctor and really isn't satisfied with the answer they received, or felt like the doctor didn't examine them long enough, or felt like their doctor didn't pay enough attention to a reported symptom, Wikipedia can be a valuable and predominantly accurate resource to help the patient understand their symptoms a little better and make the decision to go get a second opinion. It can also help them know what to look out for in the days/weeks before they decide to see a doctor. The problem is when people use Wikipedia/WebMD alone and then that becomes their single source of information. That's definitely the worst case scenario, and I wouldn't disagree with the BBC focusing on that. I guess I just took issue with the way it portrayed Wikipedia given the nature of the research and what the statistic was actually measuring.
Completely agree with your post. I think it ultimately comes down to this: people "just wanna be fixed." They want a magic pill that will solve their problem or the single surgery that will make them feel 20 again. They want those things with minimal work involved and, consequently, they don't have much investment in their own care. This leads to people following physician orders blindly without question, and while most physicians are well-trained and this trust is accurately placed, there are some bad apples out there that do some real harm. For what it's worth, Medscape and WebMD are actually pretty good resources for medical knowledge for laypeople - much better than Wikipedia. The ultimate source of medical knowledge is UpToDate - it's what I use as a quick reference - but it's blocked by a paywall and by no means written for easy comprehensibility by laypeople. The problem is that medical knowledge is not the end-all be-all for medical practice. I "learned" pretty much everything you can find in those sources by the end of my second year of medical school. Coming to me and telling me what you learned on Medscape/Wikipedia/WebMD isn't helpful, because these are things that I know. Unfortunately many patients don't seem to understand this. What you get by seeing a physician is their judgment and experience - their ability to apply that medical knowledge for your particular circumstance and given your particular history. Dr. Drew Pinsky of Loveline fame put it best (transcribed from an episode of the Adam and Dr. Drew Show podcast) following someone implying that WebMD is an acceptable substitute for medical advice:“WebMD is just a bunch of... WebMD is just a bunch of inf... ok, this is - now you’ve really pushed my buttons. Cause you understand that WebMD is just a bunch of information, right? Information that we as physicians knew in our second year of medical school - second... year. Then we train for on average 8 more years - on average... 8... more... years to be able to apply that information by seeing it in real situations - developing JUDGMENT about those circumstances for your particular clinical circumstance. And then many people 10 or 20 years down the line have - they’ve seen THOUSANDS of these situations. So you go to your doctor not for what’s on WebMD - that’s information. You go for the physician to apply their judgment in that particular circumstance. It’s not about information. If it’s on WebMD, you’re just telling us the sky is blue - 'yes, we know the sky is blue.’"