Reddit and What I Found There

While on the lookout for controversies in the fields of medicine and chemistry, I decided to forage around Reddit. Reddit, as many of you may know, is an online posting site where users discuss any and all topics. While there, I found the wonderful subreddit r/medicine.

• The r/medicine subreddit had it all. Questions pre-meds had about medical school can be found two links above an in-depth report on the state of oncological research. Most users appear to be current university students who plan to pursue medicine via medical school, physical therapy school, or pharmacy school. Some users are doctors, but most posts did not appear to target this population. 

Blue, Eva. "Reddit Sticker." 1/29/2016 via Flickr. Licensed under CC Attribution 2.0 Generic. 

• Users on the forum were debating the link between vaccines and autism. The topic was started by a user who attempted to debunk the myth started by Dr. Wakefield in the 1990s that high dosages of vaccines could lead to autism. Many users commented that parents who choose not to vaccinate their children are endangering their fellow classmates and potentially exposing their peers to epidemics.  One user pointed out that although Dr. Wakefield's study was invalidated, there was a study showing that mercury levels in vaccines were dangerously high, and that high mercury levels could increase the risk of autism. I thought this was particularly interesting because I had always believe there was NO link between excessive vaccination and autism, but users had a point that a small, indirect connection did seem to exist.  

• Another topic linked to an article from a naturopathic doctor who quit his profession and 'confessed' that his education and career were largely bogus. I was pretty surprised at how one-sided this debate was on Reddit. Very few contributors stuck up for naturopathic doctors, who often play legitimate roles in medical treatment alongside physical and occupational therapists. Most comments, however, focused on the unnecessary labwork usually requested by NDs, and others mentioned specific anecdotes where an ND acted negligently. I think that the role of naturopathic medicine in the larger scheme is extremely important to resolve, and this particular Reddit thread didn't really give naturopathic medicine its fair shot. 

• The debates on Reddit left me feeling that medical students are often unfairly biased against professions outside of allopathic medicine. Reddit users, more so than Twitter users or new media journalists, were particularly biased and demonstrated enormous groupthink. Once one response bashed naturopathic doctors, every subsequent post seemed to do so in nearly identical ways. However, there was one user who adamantly defied this mentality when he or she posted about the link between vaccines and mercury in a thread filled with users who were angry at parents for not vaccinating their children. This unique post, though, was truly an anomaly.