A couple of years ago on Slate there was a thoughtful essay ("Doc Hollywood") by Rahul Parikh, M.D. (UC Berkeley, Tufts University, and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, now practicing in the San Francisco Bay area) about the pros and cons of celebrity health stories.
Dr. Parikh makes a point that should be, but apparently is not, blindingly obvious: you must consider the source of your information.
If you are reading health articles by a person with an advanced degree, whose career and credentials are known and verifiable, and who is publishing in a form subject to editing and fact-checking and professional review, you stand a good chance of getting good information. (My own favorite sources are the IDEA Fitness Journal, Yoga Journal, and Men's Health magazine, the CDC, and the Mayo Clinic site.)
If, on the other hand, you are getting all your health information from blogs and email forwards and "this is my story" pieces by anonymous or "name has been changed" random people, or celebrities with no discernible education about anything, much less medicine, there is a good chance you are getting flawed (incomplete, biased, often unsubstantiated, and sometimes completely wrong) information.
Probably 2 or 3 out of 10 pieces of information about health, politics, public safety, etc., that are forwarded by email are outright fabrications.
Another 4 out of ten may contain a nugget of truth hidden in a web of fiction.
Another 2 out of ten are conspiracy pieces wherein random, unrelated pieces of true information are strung together by finding coincidences, or manufacturing the appearance of a relationship.
That leaves 1 or 2 pieces that may be mostly true.
Those last pieces will probably, on fact-checking, turn out to have been partly true a long time ago, but completely out of date and irrelevant. A lot of information on blogs is the same way.
And a lot of stuff on blogs, in essays, in e-mail forwards etc. is deliberately written to generate strong emotional responses. It plays up the most-likely-to-excite elements and plays down the counterbalance (if it presents counterbalancing information at all) - just as television news does. It's all about getting you to stay tuned.
When I receive an email forward, I usually delete it unread. If the title suggests a topic of interest to me, I might glance at it. If it strikes me as probably fictitious (which most of them do), I check www.snopes.com, a great service that endeavors to dam up the river of nonsense that people seem to want to believe. If a piece could, by virtue of its fictitiousness, result in a believing reader getting into some sort of trouble (like the one about the "secret code" to call highway patrol if you're being followed by a car that may or may not be a real police officer), I'll reply to the sender with a note on the debunking. But generally, it is just garbage, and it goes right in the trash.
What I would suggest - rather strongly - is that anyone with an interest in a topic should do what we call Research. If you have an interest in an illness, a medication, a nutrient, a symptom, a medical procedure, a surgery, a course of treatment - look it up on the Centers for Disease Control or Mayo Clinic sites.
These sites are written and reviewed by actual medical professionals who have nothing to sell you. You can follow links to get into alternatives, recommendations, referrals, data sources, and more.
What you will NOT get is unverifiable stories by unidentifiable people who supposedly got a particular miraculous result by doing a particular thing that no qualified physician would recommend.
You won't get Steve McQueen, either: the actor diagnosed with mesothelioma in 1979 who was sure a Mexican clinic would cure him with enemas. Right up to the point the next year when he died.
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