Internet Ying and Yang

The farther along I get in life, the more important I find balance to be. Not "standing on one foot" balance, because I certainly don't have that. I meant more like the "making sure every side gets heard from" kind of balance. I find that it is almost impossible to make the right decision until you have considered all the facts and you aren't going to get all the facts unless there is at least one voice telling you all the things you may not want to hear. (Frankly, this is another in the many reasons I don't watch the 24-hour cable channels.) But, balance is important in all facets of life, not just helping to make the right choices. You need at least one person in your life who isn't just going to tell you the things you already know just to reassure you or stay on your good side. Having that one friend who calls you on your crap, while annoying in the moment, is really a good thing in the long run. It also comes in handy when you have balance on the internet. There is a lot of really bad information available and if you don't look in a few places to gather a view different answers than there is a good chance you're acting on bad advice.

I've had this very weird condition lately where, basically, I'm burping more than normal. Other than being rather inconvenient there are no other side effects. Still, burping is not the most attractive thing to do, especially in social situations, so I thought I would do some digging online to see if I could find a cause and a solution. (Considering just yesterday I told you about how the internet had me looking in the wrong place to find the computer on my truck not once but twice, I'm not really sure why I expected an easy solution to come from the world wide web.) Turns out that this search would end up giving me advice from every angle.The first website I landed on told me that this is very normal and not at all alarming. Most likely I'm swallowing too much air because my allergies are clogging up my nose and making me breath through my mouth more than normal. Once my allergies get under control the condition should go away. In the mean time I should try to cut back on certain foods and watch my soda intake (unlikely). All of that explanation seemed to make perfect sense to me and I probably should have cut my loses right there. But, I'm a glutton for punishment, so I wanted to double-check through WebMD.

Now, I've previously talked about WebMD on this site. That occasion was when it dawned on me that WebMD is like that one hypochondriac friend who immediately jumps to the worst possible conclusion based on all the symptoms prevented. I know that many doctors feel this is the best way to diagnose patients because not only do they want to rule out the most serious problem first or attack them as quickly as possible if that is what is wrong, they also want people to have the time to mentally prepare themselves for all that comes with a devastating diagnosis. The problem is that WebMD automatically jumps to that place without seeming to take into account the extremely low odds of someone in the year 2012 actually having polio. It just seems as though the site should also list the problems in the order of how likely they are, not just every disease that comes with specific symptoms. With that in mind, I really shouldn't have been surprised when I entered in my symptom and WebMD told me that I either had an ulcer, hiatal hernia or gastroesophageal reflux disease. At least with those I wouldn't have to watch how many carbonated drinks I have.

Despite that cheery outlook, I appreciate having both sides of the diagnosis rainbow at my fingertips. While most of the time I just want reassurance that not every little problem is a harbinger of something larger hiding beneath the surface, every now and again you need to know what the worst-case scenario is. And no place is better for hearing every possible outcome, both positive and negative, than the world wide web. Seriously, it doesn't matter what the issue is, someone on the web loves it while another person hates it and both are writing about it right now. As you can see, one simple internet search can give you a wide range of answers and, as is so often the case with everything else in life, the answer will probably end up being somewhere in the middle of all of them. This is what you get when it is so simple for everyone and their brother to put up a website - it is up to you to figure out who is credible and who is not. But in the end the most credible person you can see is a human doctor because nothing can take the place of people who actually know what they are looking at and not just blindly guessing at symptoms. I'm all for balance, but nothing carries more weight to tilt the scales than an actual informed opinion. It really is too bad there aren't more of those on the internet.