Two Slashes

Alright, so the title of this post is a complete and utter lie.  Read even half of the post and it might make sense.

Rather than bore you to death with the usual tirade about the poor quality of a video game or rant about the status of things on the Internet, I wanted to take a few seconds to point out some of the obvious flaws in our health education system, as revealed by HealthBase.  HealthBase, according to TechCrunch, is a medical content aggregator (I call their approach a search engine, mind you) designed to help you drill through the muck and straight to an answer.  Think WebMD, but with answers supplied by the Internet at large.

I decided that, given the nature of some of the answers I received to my queries, as well as the popularity that this particular Yahoo! Answers post (about how babies are formed, you bum) reached with some of my friends at school last year, I should answer that time-old question first.  And, as I might have hinted at with the title, HealthBase thoughtfully suggested that children are caused by secondhand smoke.  Discussing this answer with a friend, we came up with the explanation that this makes sense when you consider a drunk college girl at a smoky bar leaving with a guy she doesn’t know.  Given an image like that, I’m not surprised at all at the confusion.  I’m glad that HealthBase was able to answer that question for me.

Moving along, I decided that it was also imperative that I brush up on my profession-related injuries, so I decided to look up treatments for carpal-tunnel syndrome.  If you ignore the fact that the suggestion is based upon another name for CTS, blackberries are a suggested treatment.  If I do end up suffering from carpal-tunnel at some point in the future, I’ll make sure to stock the fridge up with as many as I can.

HealthBase also does an excellent job of educating you on the cons of insanity, which include brain dysfunction, the killing of blood relatives, and the ever-detailed “so horrific.”  I can’t wait for people who kill their families to start using this information for insanity pleas at their trials.  On the positive side, however, being classified as insane means that you have achieved your goals, which makes me wonder just how bad insanity really is.

Additionally, being a fan of House, I was curious about how HealthBase would hold up as an aid while watching episodes of the show.  Hulu (which is running through the fifth season as of this posting) sounded like a good place to pick a test episode from, and so I ended up watching “The Social Contract” (Hulu link, episode recap) through.  Borrowing from diagnoses made throughout the show, we learn that a “valid” treatment for peripheral nerve damage is manipulation (Wait, is that a House reference itself? ) and that Weil’s disease can be caused by philosophy through appropriate searches performed using the service.  So there is a reason for House’s character development to have taken the path it has, after all…

While this website may just be the ticket to confirming that snorting vinegar cures hiccups when you’re trying to impress friends, I think I’ll leave my medical opinions to a licensed professional, and I suggest that you do the same.  Frankly, I’m a little terrified that one day it might suggest that the best treatment for dandruff is something more terrifying than responsibility, like amputation or open-heart surgery, and seeing as we can’t trust people with simple things like GPS, it’s only a matter of time before we get to hear stories revolving around the use of this site unless its quality is improved.  On the other hand, though, I didn’t know that stupidity went hand-in-hand with the contents of your wallet.

In retrospect, perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned that insanity query.  I’m undoubtedly going to have even more fun watching my incoming search terms now.