I suspect this is headed for the Pit. Until that happens, I’ll take the forum into account.
Anybody can ask anything, and anybody can respond. That’s the nature of a public board. If the mods or admins see anything blatantly illegal, or that will get the Reader into trouble, they can axe it, and rightly so.
This board, also, due to its nature, is self-correcting. If someone asserts that Neil Armstrong didn’t land on the moon, many dozen posters will be along shortly to debunk and/or correct said assertion. More germane to this discussion, if someone says antibiotics are good for treating viral infections, somebody (or several somebodies) will contradict that statement and, if they know the board, offer backup.
The problem, handy, is not with the board as a whole, but with your posting style and habits. You make short, off-the-cuff responses with little or no supporting documentation. Moreover, you rarely return to a thread to expand on your original comments. And most damning, a fair proportion of your ostensibly factual statements – I would estimate a third to half – are quickly pulled down as demonstrably false, or at best misleading.
The current example is a perfect case in point. The original poster mentions green nasal discharge. Your advice: “You better get some antibiotics.” This may seem reasonable to you, and yes, it is a valid response, if the individual has a bacterial infection (which is by no means clear in the OP) and if said advice is coupled with a discussion of the dangers of overprescribing antibiotics. You qualified your response with neither of these, and thus your advice can be characterized as misleading at best, false and dangerous at worst.
I do not presume to speak for the mods and admins (so if this crosses the line, please jerk me back). However, as I see it, handy, your position is a unique one. You have an outrageously high post count, which may lull new users into taking your advice more seriously than that of others. And because of your habitual hit-and-run posting style, most other SDMB members have simply stopped bothering to correct your fallacious assertions, except in the most egregious circumstances. And hence your unique identity, somebody who (1) posts a tremendous amount of (2) inaccurate information that is (3) rarely corrected.
Thus the admonition that you, meaning you in particular, stop offering medical advice. I can’t see anybody seriously arguing with this.
P.S. The lesson for newbies, algernon, is that you can learn from handy’s mistakes. Instead of tossing out half-baked notions regarding topics on which you’re not an expert, you can take responsibility for your statements by saying, “I heard somewhere… <insert conjecture here>. I make no warranty of its accuracy, and I don’t have a cite, but I thought it was interesting. Can anybody offer perspective on this?” Thus, you get to say what you wanted to say, but by carefully including some sort of caveat, you run no risk, as handy regularly does, that your statements may be misinterpreted as the assertions of somebody who pretends to know what he’s talking about.
