Template talk:Medical advice

With Wikipedia's increased popularity and increasing user base, there is an ever-increasing number of requests for medical advice on medical-related articles.

It's important that there is a standard and impersonal way to deal with these requests.

• Firstly, it lets the commenter know there will be no reply.
• Secondly, it's standardised for all comments.
• Thirdly, it's an easy change for the editor to make, and because it is standardised, there is less chance of 'hard feelings' advice. Editors are often bound by conscience to provide at least some advice in the form of facts or references to the articles in order to soothe their conscience and allow the user to feel heard. This is very dangerous.

To reiterate the dangers of providing advice:

• To person seeking advice: advice is incorrect, not up-to-date, dangerous, deliberately misrepresented, with a COI, advocates for a dangerous or untrialled therapy, deters from seeking currently accepted medical advice, legitimises a grievance or legitmises sense of Wikipedia as a forum for advice (rather than doctor), gives improper drug names, fails to take into account patient history, requester misdiagnoses self, does not take into account local or extenuating factors (such as drug shortages or differences in genetic or family histories), and many more.
• To adviser: if a medical practitioner, make abrogate legal responsibilities to fully assess a patient; is not 'ethically' responsible in consideration of the above factors and not being able to physically interact and examine the patient; risk of encouraging patient harm by failing to encourage to go to medical practitioner, and I am sure many more.
• To Wikipedia: liability and legal consequences.

For these reasons, I have recreated this template. See this discussion here here for a discussion held in WikiProject Med to this end. Kind Regards, LT90001 (talk) 10:09, 26 August 2013 (UTC)Reply