We have too much medical information.
For most of human history access to information was the key limiting factor to acquiring knowledge and expertise. You needed a library, a university, a doctor, or at minimum a very patient relative with an encyclopedia.
High speed WiFi and AI has completely shifted this paradigm. Today we are drowning in information and everybody knows everything. Or at least everybody has a link to an opinion masquerading as facts.
There is a study for every idea, a podcast for every fear, a doctor on Instagram for every diagnosis, and a wellness influencer ready to explain why your mitochondria are depressed.
You can spend three hours researching a headache and emerge convinced you have a magnesium deficiency, mold toxicity, a brain tumor, and unresolved childhood trauma.
This is progress, apparently.
Bad information does not just waste your afternoon. It can make you avoid treatment, take treatment you do not need, spend a fortune on nonsense, or trust somebody whose main qualification is excellent lighting.
We are living in the Wild West of medical knowledge. The incentives are terrible: certainty sells, outrage sells, fear sells… extremely well.
“I looked carefully at the evidence and the answer is complicated” does not tend to go viral.
“The thing your doctor WON’T tell you” does.
This is not to say experts are always right. Institutions can be slow and doctors can be dismissive. Guidelines can lag behind evidence and money can distort incentives. Entire fields can get stuck in bad ideas longer than anyone would like to admit.
Today’s patient has an astonishing amount of access and almost no help sorting it. So no, “trust the experts” is not a complete philosophy. But neither is “I watched six videos and did my own research.”
The real skill is figuring out who deserves your trust, on what question, and why. That is much harder and matters much more.
This publication is not here to give you another avalanche of medical content. We are interested in the part that comes after the information.
How good is the evidence?
Who actually knows this subject?
What are they selling?
What does the study really show?
When should you get a second opinion?
When are you just shopping for the answer you wanted ?
And when should you stop looking?
In the age of unlimited information, the rarest medical skill is not knowing more but rather knowing what to ignore.
Because more information does not always produce better decisions.
Welcome to TMI but TLK.