The blessing and the curse that is the Internet is its power to deliver information.
Information is brain food and like food, there is the good and the bad.
The most helpful and the most dangerous information floating around the web is about health.
A UBC professor was in Prince George this week offering tips on where the helpful health information can be found online and how to recognize bad advice.
Sales pitches disguised as important health information are tricky but Richard Wassersug says spotting them just takes some patience and a willingness to read the small print.
"At the end they have disclaimers saying this is only for information purposes, we're not giving any medical advice," Wassersug said. "These are legalistic disclaimers essentially refuting everything that they said at the front end and they're hoping you never read the tiny print at the back end."
That vulnerability makes people susceptible to what they want to hear - a cheap, fast-acting cure. Even when the only science behind the "cure" is clever marketing that won't get rid of ailments but will get rid of the weight in someone's wallet, many people can't resist the prospect of a medical shortcut.
Wassersug encourages people to educate themselves through online databases that offer articles from peer-reviewed medical journals and then work with their doctor. Patients are more educated about their health issues than ever before and can bring in new information for doctors to incorporate into treatment.
Yet even this health advice should be followed carefully. Adults well-informed on health care sounds great in theory if it reduces health scams and encourages people to take a more active involvement in their treatment and to ask better questions of their doctors. Unfortunately, what Wassersug, who is not a medical doctor, is suggesting could also cause more harm than good.
While doctors are willing to discuss treatment alternatives during an appointment, they are not interested in a lengthy debate about the results of a new round of clinical trials recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Not when there's a waiting room full of patients, rounds to do at the hospital and a class to teach at the medical school.
It's not only inefficient and wasteful, it's rude and disrespectful to the person being asked to address a health issue.
Patients coming in to their doctor's office or to the emergency room with medical journal articles and saying that's the treatment they'd like for their condition is about as bad as going into a restaurant, ordering lasagna and then insisting the chef follow the recipe they brought in.
Furthermore, medical journals are usually reporting research at various stages, rather than definitive results. Encouraging doctors to adopt new treatments being explored in academia, rather than follow more traditional practices, is risky. In other words, are you sure that lasagna recipe makes good lasagna or while it make you sick?
For Holly Hill and her family, the suffering she was going through from an aggressive cancer was enough for her to try unconventional treatments from a Prince George oncologist. Dr. Suresh Katakkar later resigned after the B.C. Cancer Agency started investigating his treatment practices and Hill, just 33 years old, died in May of 2012 from a blood infection she got while her immune system was weakened from a round of chemotherapy.
While Hill's family and many others came forward in the summer of 2012, after Katakkar had left Prince George, to praise his work, the B.C. Cancer Agency found that Katakkar didn't follow recognized treatment procedures for 10 per cent of his patients, which the agency "considered unacceptable, meaning it didn't meet the standard anywhere and there was no evidence to support what he had done."
That begs the question of which kind of doctor (and treatment) is more preferable - the conservative one of well-tested and accepted forms of treatment or the more innovative one of new but untested techniques?
Wassersug is right that a more health literate population is good for everyone but there are times when too much information, like too much food, can be hard to digest and get in the way of treatment.
