Doctor Wikipedia

Hex · Unread post by **Hex** » Sun Oct 05, 2014 7:01 pm

The Open Medicine post says:

Contributors: James Heilman brought the article to Wikipedia’s “good
article” status (i.e., an article with no obvious problems, approaching the
quality of a professional encyclopedia)...

If you think that's what "good article" means, I have a lovely bridge you might be interested in buying.

Hex · Unread post by **Hex** » Sun Oct 05, 2014 7:11 pm

I see that full-time Wikipedia information expert Demiurge1000 has decided to use the Signpost's comments section to make an oblique and exceedingly limp swipe at our poster Mancunium. Picturing someone in a Cheetos-stained t-shirt sniggering as they type surrounded by a forest of empty Mountain Dew bottles in a dingy single bedroom that reeks of sweat has rarely been easier.

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Sun Oct 05, 2014 9:24 pm

Textnyymi wrote:This information is not to be considered as medical advice and could not be accurate.

I hope that's a mistranslation. The wording as given may mean "it could not possibly be accurate", which is a slight exaggeration. Better: "and could be inaccurate" or "and may not be accurate".

Vigilant · Unread post by **Vigilant** » Mon Oct 06, 2014 4:17 pm

Hex wrote:I see that full-time Wikipedia information expert Demiurge1000 has decided to use the Signpost's comments section to make an oblique and exceedingly limp swipe at our poster Mancunium. Picturing someone in a Cheetos-stained t-shirt sniggering as they type surrounded by a forest of empty Mountain Dew bottles in a dingy single bedroom that reeks of sweat has rarely been easier.

Perhaps he missed his weekly "chess game" and so he's not as turgid as usual?

EricBarbour · Unread post by **EricBarbour** » Tue Oct 07, 2014 12:37 am

Vigilant wrote:
Hex wrote:I see that full-time Wikipedia information expert Demiurge1000 has decided to use the Signpost's comments section to make an oblique and exceedingly limp swipe at our poster Mancunium. Picturing someone in a Cheetos-stained t-shirt sniggering as they type surrounded by a forest of empty Mountain Dew bottles in a dingy single bedroom that reeks of sweat has rarely been easier.
Perhaps he missed his weekly "chess game" and so he's not as turgid as usual?

Adding this to the D1000 list of horror.

Unread post by **HRIP7** » Mon Oct 27, 2014 11:56 pm

Mancunium wrote:Study: Most Wikipedia articles about medical conditions contain errors
ABC News, 3 October 2014 link http://www.kait8.com/story/26694176/stu ... ain-errors[/link]
Doctors said relying on Wikipedia for medical information is a mistake. A research article in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association compared Wikipedia to medical journals and found major flaws in articles regarding diabetes, high blood pressure, lung cancer and more. [...] "Everybody uses Wikipedia and everybody uses Google, but it's not the place to go for your health care needs," said Dr. Shane Speights with St. Bernards Medical Center. [...] "If individuals start looking up high blood pressure and diabetes and start assuming that's all fact in there, that would be a mistake," Dr. Speights said. He said people then make bad decisions based on bad medical information. "When it comes to your health care, you want the right answer, not the quickest," Dr. Speights said. To test the article's results, Dr. Speights looked up another major medical condition that was not included in the study: Ebola_virus_disease (T-H-L).

"I Google Ebola and the second one is Wikipedia," he said. "That's the first one people click on because they think, 'Well, it's the easiest and maybe it's the best.'" But Dr. Speights said that's wrong. He noticed errors early on in the Wikipedia article on Ebola. "I don't know about this, where they cited it," he said. "They cited the New York Times Magazine. We don't do that." Dr. Speights said doctors never cite newspaper articles, rather journal articles and studies. "So even on Ebola, just in this quick review here, we found this is not referenced correctly," he said. [...] Dr. Speights said people can find better information by taking a few more seconds to scroll down the Google search results page. "It's going to be right here at the CDC," he said. "That's a reputable website. It's fifth down the page." Dr. Speights said the following websites are reputable sources that he would recommend using for medical information: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, World Health Organization and New England Journal of Medicine. "They're actually going to look at the information and make sure that there is good, reliable facts behind the information they post," he said. [...]
Video of the ABC News television report is embedded.

The above makes an interesting counterpoint to yesterday's New York Times article: "Wikipedia Emerges as Trusted Internet Source for Ebola Information", by Noam Cohen (of course).

Adding a little extra spice is the fact that Dr Speights complained about citations to the New York Times in Wikipedia's Ebola article. And those citations are still there, ten in total, at the time of writing, sourcing content like the following:

Most people spread the virus through blood, feces and vomit.[25]

It is recommended that the bodies of people who have died from Ebola be buried or cremated only with proper care.[83]

[...] the virus had infected pigs.[175]

TKM-Ebola is a small interfering RNA compound, currently being tested in a Phase I clinical trial in humans.[199]

ZMapp has proved effective in a trial involving rhesus macaque monkeys.[199]

That sourcing violates Wikipedia's own sourcing guideline (Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources_(medicine)#Popular_press (T-H-L)). For life-and-death matters, there's really no good reason to consult Wikipedia rather than, say, the CDC.

Mancunium · Unread post by **Mancunium** » Wed Oct 29, 2014 10:18 am

Back in the hot zone: what to read about Ebola
by Michelle Dean, The Guardian, 28 October 2014 link http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/o ... bola-books[/link]

Google “Ebola” now and you’ll be confronted with a boxed message from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) at the top of the page and a slew of nutty headlines below it. For those of you, like me, who feel helpless in the face of big phenomena we do not understand – say, you know, an infectious disease whose symptoms and lethalness are straight out of a Michael Crichton novel – reading can be a consolation. But it’s hard to string-stitch much comfort from the alarmist tabloid press, WebMD, Wikipedia, and the odd PDF of an epidemiology paper. [...] All current writing on Ebola has to reckon with a single, largely outdated book: Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone, an instant No1 bestseller when it was published in 1994. [...] But if that piece has tempted you to turn to The Hot Zone now to learn about Ebola, keep in mind it’s been over 20 years since it was published. Even Preston told the New York Times recently that he thinks it needs updating. While early chapters do describe the ravages Ebola can make on the human body, the book is largely about an Ebola outbreak among monkeys in Reston, Virginia. [...]

A much more thorough primer, actually, came earlier this month from the science writer David Quammen. A short, quick read of a book, Ebola: the Natural and Human History of a Deadly Virus is more up-to-date than The Hot Zone. [...] But when he’s detailing the science Quammen manages to sound just like the patient high school science teacher we all want to hear from in times of turmoil. He carefully takes us through newer outbreaks and scientific discovery about the virus. His explanations of biological terms like “zoonosis” and “reservoir species” have a wonderful directness and clarity to them. [...] Quammen is not, however, totally sanguine about the slow creep of the disease. His slower pace and measured tone is not cover for a state of denial. He explains that the disease is unpredictable in part because it is zoonotic, because it mutates quickly and can hide from us for ages and then emerge, as it has this year, seemingly from nowhere. That quality of creeping out at us from the dark is part of what gives Ebola its terrifying quality; it’s good to know that there is at least one person who, though he might be shaking a little himself, is trying to shine a clear and sober flashlight into the cave.

Ebola: The Natural and Human History of a Deadly Virus: link http://www.amazon.com/Ebola-Natural-Hum ... 0393351556[/link]

Mancunium · Unread post by **Mancunium** » Mon Nov 03, 2014 11:40 pm

How Wikipedia Data Is Revolutionizing Flu Forecasting
Epidemiologist want to forecast disease like meteorologists forecast rain. And the way people browse Wikipedia could be the key, they say.
MIT Technology Review, 3 November 2014 link http://www.technologyreview.com/view/53 ... recasting/[/link]

[...] Today, Kyle Hickmann from Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico and a few pals reveal the results of their model which used real-time data from Wikipedia to forecast the ground truth data gathered by the CDC that surfaces about two weeks later. [...]

Forecasting the 2013--2014 Influenza Season using Wikipedia
Cornell University Library: link http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.7716[/link]
PDF of study: link http://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.7716v1.pdf[/link]

Mancunium · Unread post by **Mancunium** » Tue Nov 04, 2014 12:12 am

An interview with James Heilman.

B.C. doctor part of team editing popular Wikipedia page on Ebola
by Amy Judd, Global News, 3 November 2014 link http://globalnews.ca/news/1651180/b-c-d ... -on-ebola/[/link]

[...] When Heilman is not in the emergency room, he can often be found in front of his computer, managing Wikipedia’s medical content. [...]

left to right: Mother Teresa, James Heilman, Albert Schweitzer

thekohser · Unread post by **thekohser** » Tue Nov 04, 2014 7:10 pm

Mancunium wrote:How Wikipedia Data Is Revolutionizing Flu Forecasting
Epidemiologist want to forecast disease like meteorologists forecast rain. And the way people browse Wikipedia could be the key, they say.
MIT Technology Review, 3 November 2014 link http://www.technologyreview.com/view/53 ... recasting/[/link]

Wow, it's utterly amazing. Wikipedia provides an insight that nobody at Google ever could have done.

When they say they used "Wikipedia access logs", I wonder if they used the same page-view data sets that are notoriously susceptible to unexplained spikes in (probably bot-driven) traffic?

EricBarbour · Unread post by **EricBarbour** » Tue Nov 04, 2014 9:31 pm

This juxtaposition is more appropriate, and nasty, than people realize.
http://www.christianpost.com/news/the-a ... esa-65071/

Mancunium · Unread post by **Mancunium** » Wed Nov 05, 2014 12:08 am

EricBarbour wrote:This juxtaposition is more appropriate, and nasty, than people realize.

I think Mother Teresa's nastiness is pretty well common knowledge. Wikipedia even has an article (for the moment) named Criticism_of_Mother_Teresa (T-H-L). Her diabolical Home for the Dying in Calcutta was literally the last place any dying person would want to be. She reveled in the suffering of the poor, denying analgesics to her victims while promising them pie in the sky; her own death she approached by jetting around the world to upmarket medical clinics, clinging to life with the desperation of one who is horrified by the thought of oblivion, or terrified by the prospect of eternal hellfire.

But nobody is perfect:

Albert_Schweitzer#Criticism_of_Schweitzer (T-H-L)

The journalist James Cameron visited Lambaréné in 1953 (when Schweitzer was 78) and found significant flaws in the practices and attitudes of Schweitzer and his staff. The hospital suffered from squalor and was without modern amenities, and Schweitzer had little contact with the local people.[37] Cameron did not make public what he had seen at the time: according to a recent BBC dramatisation,[38] he made the unusual journalistic decision to withhold the story, and resisted the expressed wish of his employers to publish an exposé. American journalist John Gunther also visited Lambaréné in the 1950s and reported Schweitzer's patronizing attitude towards Africans. He also noted the lack of Africans trained to be skilled workers.[39] [...]

And these plaster saints are

thekohser wrote:Wow, it's utterly amazing. Wikipedia provides an insight that nobody at Google ever could have done.

When they say they used "Wikipedia access logs", I wonder if they used the same page-view data sets that are notoriously susceptible to unexplained spikes in (probably bot-driven) traffic?

In fact, nothing is perfect:

Your Wikipedia searches can reveal national flu trends
by Rachel Feltman, The Washington Post, 4 November 2014 link http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/spea ... lu-trends/[/link]

The next time you look up flu symptoms on Wikipedia, you might be helping experts track the virus's spread. [...] Neither of these algorithms is perfect, but it probably won't be long before our Web browsing histories are being used to track global disease trends.

Mancunium · Unread post by **Mancunium** » Wed Nov 05, 2014 2:53 am

This is precious.

Wikipedia Helps Track Spread of Flu
by Leasa Boisvert, Jilard News, 4 November 2014 link http://jilard.com/wikipedia-helps-track ... lu/288078/[/link]

[...] To reduce spreading the flu yourself or catching it, you can also wash your hands frequently, use hand sanitizer, cough or sneeze into your sleeve instead of your hands, and be careful of frequently-touched surfaces such as door handles. In addition, keep using Wikipedia to search for flu information and give CDC researchers the data they need to track the spread of the flu this season.

Everyone with a sniffle thinks they have "the flu".

1918_flu_pandemic (T-H-L)

The 1918 flu pandemic (January 1918 – December 1920) was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic, the first of the two pandemics involving H1N1 influenza virus.[1] It infected 500 million[2] people across the world, including remote Pacific islands and the Arctic, and killed 50 to 100 million of them—three to five percent of the world's population[3]—making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history.[2][4][5][6] [...]

Keep using Wikipedia to search for flu information
and give CDC researchers the data they need.
Maybe the next time we'll see it coming.

thekohser · Unread post by **thekohser** » Wed Nov 05, 2014 2:38 pm

Researcher Geoffrey Fairchild has responded to me on the MIT Technology Review page.

You may have to click "Oldest" to see all the comments.

EricBarbour · Unread post by **EricBarbour** » Thu Nov 06, 2014 5:27 am

Lot of good it did you -- he's smooth, and has an answer to every objection.

thekohser 1 day ago

"Epidemiologist want to forecast..." With such careful proofreading, it certain that the information in this story is 100% reliable! As it turns out, there's nothing new in this study that couldn't have already been obtained by Google: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q= ... 08m&cmpt=q

gfairchild 1 day ago
@thekohser Disclaimer: I am one of the authors of the paper. While it's true that Google Flu Trends has been around for a while and has been successful for a variety of reasons, our work is doing several things that Google doesn't offer. First, Google Flu Trends does not forecast. Google Flu Trends nowcasts; that is, Google attempts to understand the current state (this is necessary due to lags in disease reporting). The paper discussed here presents forecasting methods; that is, we attempt to predict the future. Second, the data that feed Google Flu Trends are private. If you want to build a Google Malaria Trends or want to improve Google Flu Trends, for example, you can't because the data are private. All Wikipedia access logs are publicly available, so you can conceivably nowcast and forecast a variety of diseases in a variety of locations. I would encourage you to read our other paper (http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.3612 - soon to appear in PLOS Computational Biology) for more information. We provide a detailed discussion of why Wikipedia data are necessary in computational epidemiology.

thekohser 17 hours ago
@gfairchild Delighted that you responded. Could you give more information about which "Wikipedia access log" data you used? The data that is generally available to the public is often stricken with anomalous page views, likely caused by rogue bot crawlers, but that nobody at the Wikimedia Foundation seems able to explain. See this story (re Malapascua), for example: http://www.examiner.com/article/wikiped ... ugust-2011

gfairchild 12 hours ago
@thekohser, sure! The dumps we used can be found at https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-raw/. There are a lot of interesting quirks that we discovered about the data. First, they're just raw mostly-unprocessed access logs. If you visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Djksabdkjsbadkjbsa, Djksabdkjsbadkjbsa will appear in this hour's access logs, even though that is clearly not a valid Wiki article. There are also some tough challenges with article renamings/redirects that we discovered (we go into more detail about one particularly interesting article renaming issue on page 19 of out paper in http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.3612). And it's definitely true that bots patrolling Wikipedia can/will artificially inflate article access counts. However, in 8 of the 14 disease-location contexts we looked at in our paper (including flu in the U.S.), this didn't seem to affect our model (our flu in the U.S. model achieved an r^2 of 0.89, indicating very good fit). I suspect that this rogue bot problem will only be an issue for disease-location contexts where the disease isn't common or popular or if the disease falls in line with the types of disease-locations contexts we found didn't work in our paper.

thekohser · Unread post by **thekohser** » Thu Nov 06, 2014 11:31 am

EricBarbour wrote:Lot of good it did you -- he's smooth, and has an answer to every objection.

I think it's commendable that he's engaging me on my questions.

Unread post by **Zoloft** » Thu Nov 06, 2014 2:55 pm

thekohser wrote:
EricBarbour wrote:Lot of good it did you -- he's smooth, and has an answer to every objection.
I think it's commendable that he's engaging me on my questions.

Yes, he's not exactly dodging, he's providing insight into his reasoning.

Mancunium · Unread post by **Mancunium** » Thu Nov 06, 2014 9:55 pm

Geoffrey Fairchild et al. will apparently be tracking flu-related page views originating in the USA, and are therefore hoping that the next global pandemic will originate in that country. How could they have used their method to track the current Ebola pandemic, which only became WP-view-worthy when a few white folks started dying? When the first case of Ebola was reported in Nigeria, all Wikipedia had to offer was this: link viewtopic.php?p=106269#p106269[/link]

Mancunium wrote:First case of ebola reported in Africa's most populous city Lagos
Death marks new and alarming cross-border development in world's biggest epidemic spreading across three countries
The Guardian, 26 July 2014 link http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/j ... os-nigeria[/link]
A man has died of ebola in Lagos [Nigeria], the first confirmed case of the highly contagious and deadly virus in Africa's most populous metropolis. [...] The death marks a new and alarming cross-border development in a disease that has spiralled into the world's biggest epidemic, spread across three west African countries. At least 660 people have died in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone since ebola was first diagnosed in February.
I could find only only one Nigerian news story containing medical information about this terrible virus.

All You Need To Know About Ebola Virus – Wikipedia
Osun Defender, 26 July 2014 link http://www.osundefender.org/?p=179107&cpage=1[/link]

The article is nothing but a quotation from the current Wikipedia article about Ebola_virus_disease (T-H-L), and it is absolutely worthless for the population that is being threatened by this outbreak, and wants to know how to protect itself.
[...] The potential for widespread EVD epidemics is considered low due to the high case-fatality rate, the rapidity of demise of patients, and the often remote areas where infections occur…

Source: Wikipedia

60% of world's population still won't have Internet by the end of 2014
by Salvador Rodriguez, Los Angeles Times, 7 May 2014 link http://www.latimes.com/business/technol ... story.html[/link]

The United Nations this week released a report that says nearly 3 billion people will have access to the Internet by the end of 2014. That means 60% of the world's population -- about 4.2 billion -- will remain unconnected. The report says 78% of people in developed countries are expected to have access to the Internet, but in countries that are still developing, the percentage of connected users drops dramatically. In those countries, only 32% of the population is expected to have access to the Internet by the end of the year. Separated by regions, Africa has the lowest percentage of connected people, with only 20% of the population expected to have Internet access by the end of the year. [...]

Global_Internet_usage (T-H-L)

Internet users by region 2013 a,b
Africa 16%
Americas 61%
Arab States 38%
Asia and Pacific 32%
Commonwealth of Independent States 52%
Europe 75%
a Estimate. b Per 100 inhabitants.
Source: International Telecommunications Union.[4]

Carna Botnet "Internet Census 2012"

Mancunium · Unread post by **Mancunium** » Tue Nov 11, 2014 2:21 am

Team taps Wikipedia for flu forecasting data
by Nick Paul Taylor, FierceBiotech IT, 10 November 2014 link http://www.fiercebiotechit.com/story/te ... 2014-11-10[/link]

[...] A team from the Los Alamos National Laboratory is the latest to publish details of its model, which uses Wikipedia access logs to predict the spread of influenza. By combining the access logs for Wikipedia articles related to flu with CDC data, the team has created a model which it claims can accurately predict the incidence of influenza. The model goes one step further than Google Flu Trends by trying to predict the future, instead of just giving a real-time estimate of the spread of the virus. The Wikipedia-based approach could suffer from similar problems to Google Flu Trends, namely the possibility that the online activity of hypochondriacs will skew the model. Test data published to date suggest the Wikipedia model doesn't suffer from overestimation, perhaps because CDC data is built into its calculations. In fact, the model tends to underestimate flu incidence towards the end of the season. [...]

Mancunium · Unread post by **Mancunium** » Fri Nov 14, 2014 4:35 am

Wikipedia 'foresees virus outbreaks'
BBC News, 13 November 2014 link http://www.bbc.com/news/health-30021644[/link]

Wikipedia page views can predict disease outbreaks nearly a month before official health advice, a team of US scientists says. The Los Alamos National Laboratory team says people are searching online before seeking medical help. They managed to forecast tuberculosis and influenza outbreaks four weeks in advance. Other experts said they were "wary" about the value of using online searches to predict outbreaks. [...] But it is not clear from the present study whether the model will be useable in countries where access to the internet is poor. Dr Heidi Larson, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said the Wikipedia research data was "compelling" but she would be "wary" about using it as a tool for predicting outbreaks of all disease. She said that people needed to have internet access, be literate, and be familiar with Wikipedia and with the disease itself. [...] "I'm not sure how much Wikipedia is used in Africa," she said. "For issues like Ebola, I don't think people at the beginning of the outbreak in West Africa would have [been searching], because they wouldn't have had it [Ebola] before."

How Wikipedia reading habits can successfully predict the spread of disease
by Elahe Izadi, The Washington Post, 13 November 2014 link http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-y ... f-disease/[/link]

[...] "Nowcasting is cool, but ideally you want to provide information to public health departments and policymakers so they can plan ahead of time," said Sara Del Valle, a project leader at Los Alamos National Laboratory whose team worked on the study. "Because if you really want to make a difference in how people are treated when they come to clinics and hospitals, it's better for them to be prepared. If they know in advance, we will see people in a couple of weeks, four weeks, they can better prepare." [...] But not all the diseases or countries yielded such results; they couldn't predict slow-progressing diseases like HIV/AIDS, or diseases with very small numbers of victims, such as Ebola (before the current outbreak) in Uganda or the plague in the United States. [...] And the study had other limitations; for instance, researchers used language as a proxy for country (Japanese articles about influenza were used to predict the spread of the disease in Japan). That may work for some languages, but for some more widely spoken ones, like English, it can be trickier. [...]

Wikipedia Positioned To Track Disease Outbreak: The Model That Could Rival Current Resources
by Stephanie Castillo, Medical Daily, 13 November 2014 link http://www.medicaldaily.com/wikipedia-p ... ces-310590[/link]

I can still see the faces of my peers the minute after my college English professor said she loved to use Wikipedia. It’s a great place to start, she said. Knowing Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia where news anchors work “part-time as Death” and Spot the Dog “sips whiskey,” my peers and I were confused. But new research from PLoS Computational Biology suggests it was us, not our professor, who was wrong. [...] “Traditional, biologically-focused monitoring techniques are accurate but costly and slow; in response, new techniques based on social Internet data, such as social media and search queries, are emerging,” researchers wrote. “These efforts are promising, but important challenges in the areas of scientific peer review, breadth of diseases and countries, and forecasting hamper their operational usefulness.” In order to see if these challenges can be overcome, researchers used two data sources — Wikipedia article access logs and official disease incidence reports from the World Health Organization — to build a linear model to analyze around three years of data for seven diseases (cholera, dengue, Ebola, HIV/AIDs, influenza, plague, and tuberculosis) in nine different locations (Haiti, Brazil, Thailand, Uganda, China, Japan, Poland, United States, and Norway). Basically, the Internet keeps track of a user's health-related searches, and these searches can be captured and used to derive actionable information. With the WHO's data and online traffic of select Wikipedia articles, researchers were able to warn against (forecast) incidences of disease at least 28 days ahead of time. The one excepetion were rates of tuberculosis in China. [...]

thekohser · Unread post by **thekohser** » Fri Nov 14, 2014 2:19 pm

I would like to put to rest this bullshit that Wikipedia "predicts" viral outbreaks. It does no such thing. Wikipedia page views are reactive to news media impressions, not predictive.

I was tempted to place another label on the September 8 spike in page views, with "Over 22,000 moms with a kid with the sniffles think the children have enterovirus." (The CDC has documented fewer than 1,200 cases of enterovirus 68 this season.)

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Sat Dec 06, 2014 5:49 pm

No need to worry about medical articles any more. WMUK is on the case. link https://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/Medical_education[/link]

EricBarbour · Unread post by **EricBarbour** » Sun Dec 07, 2014 3:25 am

thekohser wrote:I would like to put to rest this bullshit that Wikipedia "predicts" viral outbreaks. It does no such thing. Wikipedia page views are reactive to news media impressions, not predictive.

Good blog post.

mac · Unread post by **mac** » Sun Dec 07, 2014 6:58 pm

Harvard Doc To Wikipedia: You’re Not Playing Fair On Alternative Trauma Therapy
Dr. Eric Leskowitz, November 28, 2014, 90.9 WBUR (NPR Boston)link

Up until recently, I’ve thought of Wikipedia as one of the great breakthroughs of the Internet era — a gigantic encyclopedia of everything, right at our fingertips, with real-time updates in all spheres of human knowledge. I even consult it regularly for medical information as part of my work as a practicing psychiatrist.

But in the past few months, I’ve been reconsidering the venture. Why? In a nutshell, it appears that the folks at Wikipedia have a problem with a fairly new sort of therapy that I practice and find helpful for certain patients.

Here’s the backstory.

Unread post by **Zoloft** » Mon Dec 08, 2014 12:54 am

mac wrote:Harvard Doc To Wikipedia: You’re Not Playing Fair On Alternative Trauma Therapy
Dr. Eric Leskowitz, November 28, 2014, 90.9 WBUR (NPR Boston)link

Up until recently, I’ve thought of Wikipedia as one of the great breakthroughs of the Internet era — a gigantic encyclopedia of everything, right at our fingertips, with real-time updates in all spheres of human knowledge. I even consult it regularly for medical information as part of my work as a practicing psychiatrist.

But in the past few months, I’ve been reconsidering the venture. Why? In a nutshell, it appears that the folks at Wikipedia have a problem with a fairly new sort of therapy that I practice and find helpful for certain patients.

Here’s the backstory.

Okay, let's run this through my test for medical therapies:

Does the proponent have a big, fluffy beard? √

Does the treatment involve acupuncture pressure points √
The word 'energy' √
Treating illnesses that are characterized by spontaneous recovery? √

For no reason at all I am placing a decorative bird icon here:

lonza leggiera · Unread post by **lonza leggiera** » Mon Dec 08, 2014 2:42 am

Zoloft wrote:
mac wrote:Harvard Doc To Wikipedia: You’re Not Playing Fair On Alternative Trauma Therapy
Dr. Eric Leskowitz, November 28, 2014, 90.9 WBUR (NPR Boston)link

Up until recently, I’ve thought of Wikipedia as one of the great breakthroughs of the Internet era — a gigantic encyclopedia of everything, right at our fingertips, with real-time updates in all spheres of human knowledge. I even consult it regularly for medical information as part of my work as a practicing psychiatrist.

But in the past few months, I’ve been reconsidering the venture. Why? In a nutshell, it appears that the folks at Wikipedia have a problem with a fairly new sort of therapy that I practice and find helpful for certain patients.

Here’s the backstory.
Okay, let's run this through my test for medical therapies:

Does the proponent have a big, fluffy beard? √

Does the treatment involve acupuncture pressure points √
The word 'energy' √
Treating illnesses that are characterized by spontaneous recovery? √

For no reason at all I am placing a decorative bird icon here:

Does the proponent display prominently on his bookshelf such medical classics as:

The Natural Pharmacy ? √
Alternative Medicine ? √
Optional (oops) Optimal Wellness. Where Mainstream and Alternative Medicine Meet by Ralph Golan M.D. ? √; and
Something with "Feng Shui" in the title ? √

EricBarbour · Unread post by **EricBarbour** » Mon Dec 08, 2014 4:26 am

Fucking hippies grumble grumble.

sparkzilla · Unread post by **sparkzilla** » Mon Dec 08, 2014 4:48 am

The other day when I mentioned to someone that Wikipedia's medical information was dangerously incorrect I was told that I should fix the problem by editing the pages myself.

Cedric · Unread post by **Cedric** » Mon Dec 08, 2014 12:18 pm

sparkzilla wrote:The other day when I mentioned to someone that Wikipedia's medical information was dangerously incorrect I was told that I should fix the problem by editing the pages myself.

Of course you were told that. SOFIXIT is how Wikipedia "works".

Anthonyhcole · Unread post by **Anthonyhcole** » Sat Apr 04, 2015 12:22 pm

Wikipedia and medicine: quantifying readership, editors, and the significance of natural language
Heilman JM1, West AG
2015 Mar 4

Conclusions: Although Wikipedia has a considerable volume of multilingual medical content that is extensively read and well-referenced, the core group of editors that contribute and maintain that content is small and shrinking in size.

Textnyymi · Unread post by **Textnyymi** » Sat Apr 04, 2015 2:07 pm

I hope that's a mistranslation. The wording as given may mean "it could not possibly be accurate", which is a slight exaggeration. Better: "and could be inaccurate" or "and may not be accurate".

Right, it's more like "might be inaccurate". Everything on Wikipedia might be inaccurate.

Someone should convince Jimbo to thoughtfully and politely enforce the placement of warning templates upon medical articles before someone gets hurt!

The other day when I mentioned to someone that Wikipedia's medical information was dangerously incorrect I was told that I should fix the problem by editing the pages myself.

No, no, no! You should be paid for doing that! Instead, you could politely ask Tyciol, Midnight68, and Meco to edit those pages for you! They're far more experienced in Wiki editing anyway, right?

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Sun Apr 05, 2015 3:37 pm

I hope that's a mistranslation. The wording as given may mean "it could not possibly be accurate", which is a slight exaggeration. Better: "and could be inaccurate" or "and may not be accurate".

How about "it could be accurate" or "it could possibly be accurate"? That would be a fair statement.

EricBarbour · Unread post by **EricBarbour** » Wed Apr 08, 2015 11:37 pm

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/wik ... -vs-chaos/

"Standards matter. Establishing and enforcing qualitdy standards is not censorship or a violation of anyone’s freedom, as long as the process of determining standards is transparent and fair."

"Qualitdy"? And this guy wants to lecture us on "standards"?

The main problem is not that Wikipedia has these pro-science standards. They are adequate as written and have been for several years. The problem is that certain administrators deliberately editwar, provoke and harass people pushing pseudoscience ideas, none of which is part of the "editing standards" or "policy". They use the content as a honeypot to attract people who then are harassed and humiliated for sport. Instead of simply refuting cranks and pushing them away, they make major disputes worse, deliberately, for their own sick entertainment.

And then there's the medical issues, which are mostly the result of certain arrogant MDs and their supporters trying to claim that all the content they write is "perfect and trustworthy". Therefore Wikipedia needs no disclaimers. And they lie in wait for folks like Leskowitz, ready to screw each of them over. Heilman does it occasionally and Gorski clearly revels in it. That's not a sane way to run a "reference work", is it?

Anthonyhcole · Unread post by **Anthonyhcole** » Fri May 15, 2015 2:13 pm

Wikipedia appears to dominate Google results for medical conditions, signs and symptoms. We need a bigger sample to be certain, but it appears to be the case. I took a sample of 40 of the 30-odd thousand medical articles and checked where they rank in Google searches. Wikipedia was first in 24 searches, second in 11, and third, fifth, seventh, eighth and ninth in the other five (link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Anth ... PMED_pages[/link]). I find this scary.

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Fri May 15, 2015 3:57 pm

Assuming that the sample was random, 35 out of 40 being top or second is pretty strong evidence that it will be top or second most of the time.

Wonderer · Unread post by **Wonderer** » Fri May 15, 2015 4:09 pm

You have every reason to find it scary. The potential for problems is much worse than you saying something silly to your doctor, e.g., "Doctor, is there was any way to get all this volcanic ash out of my blood so I can finally be cured of all this inflammation?" A patient might cut the doctor out altogether, instead taking dangerous measures that may actually make his or her condition worse, all thanks to Wikipedia.

I decided to look at a disease that's somewhat rare in America. If you are the unlucky 1 in 200, you might have this horrible disease.

From http://www.everydayhealth.com/specialre ... rohns.aspx

Diagnosing Crohn's can be difficult because its symptoms are similar to those of other conditions. Here's how your doctor will determine if you have it.

From Wikipedia, Crohn's disease (T-H-L):

Crohn's disease, also known as Crohn syndrome and regional enteritis, is a type of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) that may affect any part of the gastrointestinal tract from mouth to anus.[2] Signs and symptoms often include abdominal pain, diarrhea (which may be bloody if inflammation is severe), fever, and weight loss.[1][2] Other complications may occur outside the gastrointestinal tract and include anemia, skin rashes, arthritis, inflammation of the eye, and tiredness. The skin rashes may be due to infections as well as pyoderma gangrenosum or erythema nodosum. Bowel obstruction also commonly occurs and those with the disease are at greater risk of bowel cancer.[1]

Oh my God! Other than my weight gain, I think I have all of these! I might actually have Crohn's!

Certain lifestyle changes can reduce symptoms, including dietary adjustments, elemental diet, proper hydration, and smoking cessation. Smoking may increase Crohn's disease; stopping is recommended. Eating small meals frequently instead of big meals may also help with a low appetite. To manage symptoms have a balanced diet with proper portion control. Fatigue can be helped with regular exercise, a healthy diet, and enough sleep. A food diary may help with identifying foods that trigger symptoms. Some people should follow a low dietary fiber diet to control symptoms especially if fibrous foods cause symptoms.[128] Some find relief in eliminating casein (protein found in cow's milk) and gluten (protein found in wheat, rye and barley) from their diets. They may have specific dietary intolerances (not allergies).[129]

Actually not bad advice for really anyone.

Crohn's cannot be cured by surgery, though it is used in the case of partial or full blockage of the intestine. Surgery may also be required for complications such as obstructions, fistulas, or abscesses, or if the disease does not respond to drugs.

Oh, it's hopeless. I have to put on a brave face, and ask my relatives and friends to pray my Crohn's inflicted death is at least quick and painless. After my death, the autopsy will reveal I actually died of a much more common and treatable disease.

SB_Johnny · Unread post by **SB_Johnny** » Mon May 18, 2015 6:00 pm

TIL Wikiversity has a Medical Journal.

thekohser · Unread post by **thekohser** » Mon May 18, 2015 6:56 pm

SB_Johnny wrote:TIL Wikiversity has a Medical Journal.

There is some great reading material there for those looking for insomnia cures.

Let’s say that the last blood test taken by the patient was half a year ago and was normal, and that the incidence of primary hyperparathyroidism in a general population that appropriately matches the individual (except for the presentation and mentioned heredity) is 1 in 4000 per year. Ignoring more detailed retrospective analyses (such as including speed of disease progress and lag time of medical diagnosis), the time-at-risk for having developed primary hyperparathyroidism can roughly be regarded as being the last half-year, because a previously developed hypercalcemia would probably have been caught up by the previous blood test. This corresponds to a probability of primary hyperparathyroidism (PH) in the population of:

\Pr(\text{PH in population}) = 0.5\text{ years} \cdot \frac{1}{\text{4000 per year}} = \frac{1}{8000}
With the relative risk conferred from the family history, the probability that primary hyperparathyroidism (PH) would have occurred in the first place in the individual given from the currently available information becomes:

\Pr(\text{PH WHOIFPI}) \approx RR_{PH}\cdot \Pr(\text{PH in population}) = 10 \cdot \frac {1}{8000} = \frac {1}{800} = 0.00125
Primary hyperparathyroidism can be assumed to cause hypercalcemia essentially 100% of the time (rPH → hypercalcemia = 1), so this independently calculated probability of primary hyperparathyroidism (PH) can be assumed to be the same as the probability of being a cause of the presentation:

\begin{align} \Pr(\text{Hypercalcemia WHOIFPI by PH}) & = \Pr(\text{PH WHOIFPI}) \cdot r_{\text{PH} \rightarrow \text{hypercalcemia}} \\
& = 0.00125 \cdot 1 = 0.00125 \end{align}
For cancer, the same time-at-risk is assumed for simplicity, and let’s say that the incidence of cancer in the area is estimated at 1 in 250 per year, giving an population probability of cancer of:

\Pr(\text{cancer in population}) = 0.5\text{ years} \cdot \frac{1}{\text{250 per year}} = \frac{1}{500}
For simplicity, let’s say that any association between a family history of primary hyperparathyroidism and risk of cancer is ignored, so the relative risk for the individual to have contracted cancer in the first place is similar to that of the population (RRcancer = 1):

\Pr(\text{cancer WHOIFPI}) \approx RR_\text{cancer} \cdot \Pr(\text{cancer in population}) = 1 \cdot \frac{1}{500} = \frac{1}{500} = 0.002.
However, hypercalcemia only occurs in, very approximately, 10% of cancers,[1] (rcancer → hypercalcemia = 0.1), so:

\begin{align}
& \Pr(\text{Hypercalcemia WHOIFPI by cancer}) \\
= & \Pr(\text{cancer WHOIFPI}) \cdot r_{\text{cancer} \rightarrow \text{hypercalcemia}} \\ = & 0.002 \cdot 0.1 = 0.0002. \end{align}
The probabilities that hypercalcemia would have occurred in the first place by other candidate conditions can be calculated in a similar manner. However, for simplicity, let’s say that the probability that any of these would have occurred in the first place is calculated at 0.0005 in this example.

For the instance of there being no disease, the corresponding probability in the population is complementary to the sum of probabilities for other conditions:

\begin{align}
\Pr(\text{no disease in population}) & = 1 - \Pr(\text{PH in population}) - \Pr(\text{cancer in population}) \\
& {} \quad - \Pr(\text{other conditions in population}) \\
& {} = 0.997.
\end{align}
The probability that the individual would be healthy in the first place can be assumed to be the same:

\Pr(\text{no disease WHOIFPI}) = 0.997. \,
The rate at which the case of no abnormal condition still ends up in a measurement of serum calcium of being above the standard reference range (thereby classifying as hypercalcemia) is, by the definition of standard reference range, less than 2.5%. However, this probability can be further specified by considering how much the measurement deviates from the mean in the standard reference range. Let’s say that the serum calcium measurement was 1.30 mmol/L, which, with a standard reference range established at 1.05 to 1.25 mmol/L, corresponds to a standard score of 3 and a corresponding probability of 0.14% that such degree of hypercalcemia would have occurred in the first place in the case of no abnormality:

r_{\text{no disease} \rightarrow \text{hypercalcemia}} = 0.0014
Subsequently, the probability that hypercalemia would have resulted from no disease can be calculated as:

\begin{align} & \Pr(\text{Hypercalcemia WHOIFPI by no disease}) \\
= & \Pr(\text{no disease WHOIFPI}) \cdot r_{\text{no disease} \rightarrow \text{hypercalcemia}} \\
= & 0.997 \cdot 0.0014 \approx 0.0014 \end{align}
The probability that hypercalcemia would have occurred in the first place in the individual can thus be calculated as:

\begin{align}
& \Pr(\text{hypercalcemia WHOIFPI}) \\
= & \Pr(\text{hypercalcemia WHOIFPI by PH}) + \Pr(\text{hypercalcemia WHOIFPI by cancer}) \\
& {} + \Pr(\text{hypercalcemia WHOIFPI by other conditions}) + \Pr(\text{hypercalcemia WHOIFPI by no disease}) \\
= & 0.00125 + 0.0002 + 0.0005 + 0.0014 = 0.00335 \end{align}
Subsequently, the probability that hypercalcemia is caused by primary hyperparathyroidism (PH) in the individual can be calculated as:

\begin{align} & \Pr(\text{hypercalcemia is caused by PH in individual}) \\
= & \frac {\Pr(\text{hypercalcemia WHOIFPI by PH})}{\Pr(\text{hypercalcemia WHOIFPI})} \\
= & \frac {0.00125}{0.00335} = 0.373 = 37.3% \end{align}
Similarly, the probability that hypercalcemia is caused by cancer in the individual can be calculated as:

\begin{align} & \Pr(\text{hypercalcemia is caused by cancer in individual}) \\
= & \frac {\Pr(\text{hypercalcemia WHOIFPI by cancer})}{\Pr(\text{hypercalcemia WHOIFPI})} \\
= & \frac {0.0002}{0.00335} = 0.060 = 6.0%, \end{align}
and for other candidate conditions:

\begin{align} & \Pr(\text{hypercalcemia is caused by other conditions in individual}) \\
= & \frac {\Pr(\text{hypercalcemia WHOIFPI by other conditions})}{\Pr(\text{hypercalcemia WHOIFPI})} \\
= & \frac {0.0005}{0.00335} = 0.149 = 14.9%, \end{align}
and the probability that there actually is no disease:

\begin{align} & \Pr(\text{hypercalcemia is present despite no disease in individual}) \\
= & \frac {\Pr(\text{hypercalcemia WHOIFPI by no disease})}{\Pr(\text{hypercalcemia WHOIFPI})} \\
= & \frac {0.0014}{0.00335} = 0.418= 41.8\% \end{align}

EricBarbour · Unread post by **EricBarbour** » Mon May 18, 2015 8:11 pm

SB_Johnny wrote:TIL Wikiversity has a Medical Journal.

That is something I HAVE to add to the book wiki.

And this is how I wrote it up.

Started in 2014, it is possibly the most absurd and arrogant creation of any WMF project. All of the existing papers were apparently authored by the same small group of Wikiversity volunteers, who then "peer reviewed" each other's work, and then claimed that the "Journal" was therefore a valid one. One "researcher", Mikael Haggstrom, was author or co-author of seven of the 13 visible papers published by mid-2015.