Medical misinformation in the era of Google: Computational approaches to a pervasive problem
| Autor: | Scott R. Granter, David J. Papke |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2018 |
| Předmět: |
Opinion
History Opposition (planets) media_common.quotation_subject Newspaper 03 medical and health sciences 0302 clinical medicine Spite (sentiment) Humans 030212 general & internal medicine Misinformation media_common Internet Multidisciplinary White (horse) Courtesy Bathtub Communication 05 social sciences Prayer Data Accuracy Search Engine Law 0509 other social sciences 050904 information & library sciences Medical Informatics |
| Zdroj: | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 115:6318-6321 |
| ISSN: | 1091-6490 0027-8424 |
| Popis: | On December 28, 1917, a fascinating article appeared in the pages of the New York Evening Mail. The article, titled “A Neglected History,” written by H.L. Mencken, laments the fact that the 75th anniversary of the introduction of the bathtub to the United States had passed without the slightest public notice. “Not a plumber fired a salute or hung out a flag. Not a governor proclaimed a day of prayer. Not a newspaper called attention to the day” (1). Mencken goes on to detail the history of the bathtub, describing the introduction of the English bathtub by Lord John Russell in 1828, “then, as now … a puny and inconvenient contrivance—little more, in fact, than a glorified dishpan.” Mencken wrote that installation of the bathtub in Millard Fillmore's White House in 1851 led to more widespread acceptance in the United States. Quoting from the purported April 23, 1843, issue of Western Medical Repository , he goes on to record the opposition of physicians to the bathtub as dangerous to health, inviting “phthisic, rheumatic fevers, inflammation of the lungs, and the whole category of zygomatic diseases.” And he states that by 1859 the majority of the medical community had finally accepted the bathtub as harmless to health—evidenced by a poll taken at the 1859 meeting of American Medical Association in Boston, in which nearly 55% of physicians regarded the bathtub as harmless and more than 20% advocated its use as beneficial to health (1). The spread of misinformation in science and medicine is a real problem, not only in spite of technology but often because of it. To sort through the cavalcade of journal articles, legitimate and otherwise, the scientific community should devote more resources to technological approaches that identify false and retracted findings. Image courtesy of Dave Cutler (artist). … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: dpapke{at}partners.org. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1 |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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