there are some questions that google can’t answer…
… and I’m afraid that Facebook isn’t the place to go looking either.
I was happily reading Pharyngula while eating lunch (& trying to avoid dropping crumbs into my keyboard), and decided that as a good pharyngulite I should perhaps pharyngulate a poll for once. (I was not at all surprised to find that ‘pharyngulate’ is now a word in at least one on-line dictionary.)Anyway, having done so I lingered to read the comments thread associated with the poll-associated article, and discovered…
… someone asking on Facebook for advice on how to cure their type-2 diabetes. (Or rather, what ‘natural’ treatments they could use instead of their current drug regime.) And being answered by a homeopath – at least, to do them credit, the homeopath doesn’t advise any homeopathic treatments. Howerver, on his website he does claim to have reversed his own type-2 diabetes with homeopathy, diet, and exercise. Since we know that diet and exercise can have this effect, I do wonder how he could be sure that homeopathy had any impact at all…
(There were some v-e-r-y i-n-t-e-r-e-s-t-i-n-g posts on that Facebook page!)
All that aside, what I can’t get my head around is why one would ask for, or take seriously, advice given by someone on a Facebook page. Is it a case of someone who’s already made up their made but is looking for validation for that decision? Is it down to the po-mo view that all points of view, all knowledge, all ‘ways of knowing’ about an issue are equally valid? Or is it something else that can be sheeted home to a distrust of science and a misunderstanding of how science works?
0 Responses to “there are some questions that google can’t answer…”
I’d say the last option, coupled with a misunderstanding of what CAM (which misuses the “natural” banner frequently) actually is.
Not sure either. But apparently using Google trends can be useful to predict disease spread by looking at peoples search terms of symptoms etc.
http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/49/10/1557.full
No doubt Facebook will be drawn into such analytics at some point too. How often have people updated their status with “sick as a dog” or the like?
Here’s a paper about tracking disease with twitter. Specifically the H1N1 outbreak:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0014118