![]() ![]() You should not, in any way, avoid seeing your doctor or alter the frequency of your doctor visits because of anything said in this subreddit.” One that is impressed upon the sub’s users over and over again is rule six: “This subreddit is not a replacement or supplement for a doctor. She messaged its creator, who allowed her to take over, and she revamped it, adding nine rules. R/DiagnoseMe is technically 12 years old, but when Madeleine stumbled upon it around four years ago, the page was empty and dead. “I’ve had my fair share of really poor doctors that don’t listen,” Madeleine says, “As a young woman, I don’t necessarily feel that my voice is always heard.” Madeleine believes her sub provides people with the tools to speak up for themselves. Yet she believes the most revolutionary aspect of her sub is that it promotes self-advocacy. Madeleine, a 19-year-old medical student and chief moderator of r/DiagnoseMe, thinks traditional healthcare providers could learn from her sub – she argues that the ability to provide pictures could transform online appointments. She doesn’t normally give out her NHS email address but thankfully on this occasion she did.” “Because it was over the phone there was only so much information that I could really give her, so I kind of kept pushing her, ‘Can you please just let me send you a photo of this?’. While Redditors were able to see his face and offer their (inexpert) opinion, he had to beg the NHS doctor to give him her email address in order to send over some pics. ![]() Aidan’s experiences expose gaps in the UK healthcare system. “I went to Reddit first because I thought that it was a bit less official than going straight to the NHS and burdening their helplines,” he says. You’d be forgiven if you have the opposite instinct to Aidan – if the idea of anonymous Redditors commenting on your body makes you want to run for the hills. Though the sub’s moderators have verified some users as doctors, the vast majority of commenters add the disclaimer “NAD” (“not a doctor”) before their posts. Just under 19,000 people subscribe to this subreddit, which features everything from blazing rashes to mysterious markings to suddenly yellowing eyes. After a quick search, Aidan found r/DiagnoseMe, “the internet’s walk-in clinic”. “I knew that it was one of these places that I could get any sort of information that I would want,” Aidan – a Redditor of six years – explains. Google”, not many of us would turn to Reddit for help. Yet while most of us are familiar with “Dr. His first instinct? To head to Reddit.Īccording to a 2016 YouGov survey, 51 per cent of adults in the UK use the internet to self-diagnose when feeling unwell roughly a third of Americans do the same. A red, swollen, and flaky rash was taking up almost a quarter of his face. ![]() One morning, Aidan woke up, looked in the mirror, and felt a flood of panic. But over the course of a couple of weeks, the redness spread, creeping down towards his stubble and up towards his eye. When the patch started to grow and flake, he assumed it was his own fault for picking at it. One unmemorable day last summer, 22-year-old Aidan noticed a little red lump on his cheek – naturally, he thought very little of it. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |