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.

Listen to emo?  Perhaps you’re an emotionally-sensitive wrist-slitter.  How about rap?  Well, the bets are on that you’ve been having boatloads of sex and been drunk enough to make Lindsay Lohan look like a model citizen.  And jazz?  Oh, you’re probably hiding in the closet, too much of a loner to do anything social (like comment?).

I don’t mean to offend anyone there, as it’s not actually me saying any of that.  Nope, those would be (more or less) the words of Felicity Baker, who has all but attached every genre of music with some insane mental or social health diagnosis.  No offense to her, but I find it extremely ridiculous that any person who so much as turns on a radio could be diagnosed as suicidal or a drug addict.

I also say that none of this is revolutionary due to the fact that all of the “diagnoses” seem to be common themes in that genre.  For example, in a genre that (at this point in time) prides itself on “banging dem hoes” and getting “crunk,” it’s a miracle at all that someone could suggest that people who listen to rap are following along without someone having already noticed the obvious similarity. And while I can’t call H.I.M. “heavy metal”, there are enough mentions of drug use throughout metal and rock to give me credit when I point out one of the (pardon me) “documented types” of groupie.  I am, however, having a hard time picturing the corellation between techno and suicide.

The point I’m trying to make here is that this “research” isn’t really research so much as a “medically-relevant” way to stereotype people based upon the genres of music they listen to.  Think about it:  I know quite a few people who listen to those types of music, and I think the worst habit any of them have is a cigarette habit, hardly self-destructive nature at the level Baker (and the according article there) seem to imply.

Not every genre has been accounted for (at least judging by the article I linked to), but enough are mentioned to account for almost every person I’ve ever met.  And with the multifaceted nature of music, most music may actually end up classified at least partially under a genre that this article ties with “bad connotations,” or (to what probably would be a mixture of horror and ridicule) multiple “bad” genres.

I guess I’ll go back to listening to my vast library, and quit putting fuel on the fire.  Call me a depressed, drug-addicted loner with suicidal tendencies and questionable sexuality if you want, but I’m in perfectly good health and I’m not going to let something as harebrained as an amateur diagnosis of my social and mental capacities ruin my listening pleasure.  So go on then.  Ensure your path to drug addiction, wrist-cutting, and wallflower behavior today.

Side note:  I’d love to know the researcher’s medical opinion to songs like this one.  Aside from the flagrant disregard for authority, of course.