I bet everyone of you reading this blog knows someone who has a "doctor's complex", right? You know the type. They freely dish out unsubstantiated medical advice they read on-line and because they got it off the Internet, well, it must be true. Or worse, they try to cure your head cold, skin rash, or heart condition with herbal tinctures and high levels of one vitamin or another. (Now we're treading in dangerous waters.)
Really, moms are the biggest culprit. We spend so much time trying to make our babies' boo boos go away that we think we can cure cancer too. I'm the first to admit that I appreciate an old fashion panacea to make whatever I have go away but when a friend or a family member is adamant about how much Vitamin D I should take or how I should treat full-blown mastitis, I quickly start to tune them out. Because I know what they're doing. Most often, they're regurgitating information they found on a random Internet website or an article they read in Town & Country. Thanks but no thanks. Because the web is right at our fingertips and because we've all gotten so good at surfing it, we are starting to see ourselves as experts in fields we know absolutely nothing about and that's scary. We read and then we pass these unsubstantiated bits of knowledge on to our peers. But who says what we read is medically sound? The thing is we're bias ourselves. We read what we want to read from those who we like the most.
So during this horrible cold and flu season, I've learned to take others' unsolicited doctoring with a grain of salt. I smile and say, hmmmm, maybe I'll try that, and then I pick up my cell phone and call my internist.