This may be totally off-the-wall, but it seems to me that with online message boards, and maybe the SDMB in particular, you see a higher amount of people with fragile health or serious chronic health problems than in other contexts. This is just based on my personal observations of posters frequently talking about getting sick often, taking a lot of medication, having unusual allergies, and/or being generally frail. What’s the deal? Are sickly people drawn to message boards, or do online forums bring out the hypochondriac in otherwise normal people? Or am I imagining all of this?
Part of it may be that those with chronic illnesses are sometimes stuck at home in front of their computers, if they’re physically unable to do a whole lot.
Also, I think it’s just that there are plenty of chronic healthy issues you can’t necessarily see by looking at a person. Plus, your co-workers probably aren’t going to talk a whole lot about the medications they take, or their reasons for going to the doctor. On a message board, people are far more free to talk about these things.
Well, I don’t know if there’s any credence to the theory, but it kinda makes sense. People with chronic health problems who can’t get out much would be more likely to spend time socializing online.
What he said. It’s a combo of the fact that those with chronic illnesses are going to have more time to be online and that this is a mostly anonymous place to talk.
She 
Sorry about that! I’ll find a message board group for people with PGMD. 
(Post Gender Misidentification Disorder)
Might also be that the anonymity of a message board makes people less embarrassed to discuss their problems.
I also think that it is easy to see the number of people on a message board with various ills, but hard to judge how many people are on that message board that don’t have any ills.
Same principle applies in threads on rape victims, people who’ve had their houses broken into, even threads on being volunteer fire fighters.
People who fall into various semi-rare categories are appreciably more likely to mention it in threads than people who don’t.
Is “semi-rare” another term for “half-baked”?
I think we just notice when someone posts about an illness and don’t notice when someone doesn’t post about not having it. I can’t think if confirmation bias is the right term.
I think it’s mainly that.
My health is generally pretty good, but I’ve vented here recently about medical issues that I haven’t spoken about to anyone outside of healthcare professionals and my girlfriend. As far as my friends and co-workers are concerned, I’m not going to broadcast any of that crap to them. I save it all for you, 'cuz you’re so lucky.
I’ve mentioned my Raynaud’s a few times here, too.
I don’t know why, but it seems less awkward to mention such things in a message-board context. I don’t think I appear frail, but you could get that impression from my posts here, what with all the vascular problems. Can’t touch cold things or tolerate moderate outdoor winter weather without feeling considerable pain… can’t stay on my feet for more than few hours without feeling considerable pain… whine whine whine… but I do my best to conceal that IRL.
This is also the type of place you can mention ill health and have mature, considerate, and polite conversation about the issues. I won’t post to most boards, because they don’t control the immature nasty responses to simple questions or statements, This is a decent crowd to talk to. This is the only board I post medical problems. I find anybody by middle age is going to have something wrong. I have used the board for the last year and some months to refresh my mental recall and such. I’m doing much better for those that have followed my posts.