I really do love the internet. It lets me stay in touch with people I would have otherwise lost contact with, and more importantly it gives me access to research on any topic under the sun, no matter what time of day. Which comes in incredibly handy when you write historical fiction. I can’t imagine writing this same book twenty years ago. Every time I would come across an unknown – like when was the shell game invented, or what kind of undergarments did men wear during the Civil War – I would have to go to a book to look it up. If I were lucky, I would have the book I needed on hand, but if not I would have to wait until I could get in to a library and hope that they would have a book with the required info. If not, I would have to wait until a book from another library could be requested. Something that takes me thirty seconds to look up today, could have feasibly taken weeks to look up twenty years ago. That boggles the imagination. Yes, there is the total junk that you have to weed through, but the amount of knowledge at your fingertips is fantastic!
However, sometimes I think that too much knowledge can actually be a bad thing. I tend to frequent sites like the Mayo Clinic’s on a fairly regular basis. My friend’s husband was diagnosed with prostate cancer, so I did research on prostate cancer so that she wouldn’t have to explain everything to me every time we spoke. I did the same when my aunt was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, or a friend with diabetes. All of this is good, but whenever I find myself on a site like that looking up stuff about symptoms for myself I find that the answer is one of two things.
- I am clearly deficient in something, take a multi-vitamin.
- I HAVE A HORRIBLE, NASTY DISEASE AND I AM GOING TO DIE!
There’s really no in between and when your brain is presented with those two options it is obviously going to focus on option #2. Which leads to a good amount of freaking out, until common sense finally kicks in, I take a multi-vitamin and go on with my day. It really makes me wonder though, how many people experience this same phenomena – it can’t just be me – but don’t have common sense to kick in, so they go rushing to the doctor thinking that they’re dying. I can only imagine that doctors and nurses HATE all of those medical sites. Especially the ones that have the symptom checkers. You know, you enter what symptoms you have and it lists all of the horrible diseases that cause those symptoms. Actual trained medical professionals must cringe every time they hear somebody say that they did some research online, and then suggest what they think they have.
“No ma’am, you do not have Parkinson’s Disease. Your fatigue is caused by only getting three hours of sleep a night, the tremors are caused by the twelve cups of coffee you drink during the day to stay awake, and your malnutrition is due to the fact that your diet consists mainly of Cheetos. Get some sleep, lay off the caffeine, eat some real food every now and then, and you’ll be fine. Oh, and please do not procreate.”
I know that this is what happens every time I go onto one of those sites for myself. I have never once been correct about a diagnosis or explanation for symptoms. Yet I keep going back. Which if you think about it, is pretty crazy. They say that knowledge is power. What they don’t say is that sometimes it’s the power to be a well-educated idiot.
