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Comment by nanna | Hacker News Reader

> WebMD is the Internet's most important source of medical information. [WebMD, And The Tragedy Of Legible Expertise"]

I had no idea WebMD was taken this seriously. Can I recommend to HNers especially across the pond to use the excellent NHS.UK instead, for level-headed and concise medical info.

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Wow, I just looked up aspirin and warfarin (comparison used in the article) at NHS.UK, and it really is better. For example,

Q. What if I take too much?

A. (for aspirin) Taking 1 or 2 extra tablets is unlikely to be harmful. (for warfarin) If you take an extra dose of warfarin, call your anticoagulant clinic straight away.

This convinces me it's not that WebMD is a tragedy of legible expertise, but that WebMD is incompetent.

Or perhaps that the pressures against legible expertise are worse in the US?

Even as large as WebMD is, it would surprise me if they weren't using a third-party drug database to drive their public database. When I worked at a similar site, we used First DataBank [0], but there may be others too. The world of pharmaceuticals changes so rapidly that you need a small army of pharmacists and doctors scouring medical journals and materials from big pharma companies to keep your information up-to-date and it's just a lot easier to pay one of the dedicated companies that focus on that to do that work for you.

However it wouldn't surprise me if the NHS took on that task itself. Unlike WebMD, the NHS is also responsible for prescribing medications and would need to give their doctors and pharmacists up-to-date information, software and guidance for prescribing. Their scale and scope would allow them to take on this task in a way that makes less sense in the US system, where insurance providers, doctors, pharmacies and online health information are all separate entities with separate budgets/funding.

[0] https://www.fdbhealth.com/

Maybe WebMD uses a third-party database for some drugs, but they probably don’t for aspirin, and if they do they shouldn’t.

The legal and financial situations are quite different. WebMD is a US publishing company and Americans sue for everything so it has to be careful. The UK legal system makes it much harder to sue for dumb stuff and the NHS isn't going to be bankrupted being government owned.

I don't have any specifics handy, but over the years I've found a lot of information on webmd that is plainly false. Maybe it's better now, but I have been ignoring it for years and encouraging friends and family to do the same. Even Wikipedia, for all its flaws, is a better source of medical information.

(To clarify, I'm not suggesting Wikipedia is a good source of medical information -- it's not. Often I find articles say one thing and the citation says the opposite. But in spite of that, it's a much better starting point than webmd, in my non-expert opinion).

They just have the best SEO.

Mayo Clinic can be a good resource, too.

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