medical advice

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I asked a medical question on

https://patient.info/

and after four months, only one answer.

Which medical advice forums have you asked questions in, that you got a lot of good answers to?

There is no reason to seek out medical advice from random strangers when real medical personnel are available.

why would you do that? Why would anyone? The "advice" would be suspect, and the long wait times could be serious if not dangerous to one's health.

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The "patients" forum says that healthcare professionals give advice. (Of course, you can't "prove" that the advice comes from a doctor). That way, you could get multiple answers at a time, with actually leaving your house. They might take a long time to answer, but you could be doing other things in the meantime

And I wasn't talking about urgent issues that require in person medical treatment. Just ongoing concerns and questions.

Besides sometimes when I email my doctor, no answer altogether

Different doctors might respond differently to the same thing

I haven't used a medical advice forum. I'd ask relatives (or whatever) if they thought my symptoms seemed serious or if I was just being a hypochondriac and go from there if I should make an appointment with the clinic or not.

What kind of issues are you concerned about? I doubt it would hurt to make an appointment or call/email to ask about it. Though I'm not sure what your copay would be.

Around here all the medical insurers I've had have phone and secure messaging to ask questions and potentially to direct patients to the right type of doctor if it's more than what a nurse can handle.

And then there's the issue of it you do get advice from some rando that the OP does need to see a doctor or needs a prescription, then what?

I never used a medical advice forum but I have made posts on here & other forums I've used in the past about various medical things. If I just bring up an issue with my docs, they don't always understand what I'm talking about or take the problem seriously. I find things go a lot better for me when I see my doc if I have my own idea of what's going on, better idea of how to explain things, & an idea of what treatment I want to pursue. In order to do that I need to take a very proactive role with my health & do LOTS of my own research. Plus there are certain issues I need to treat myself because the docs wouldn't want to prescribe the meds for various reasons(like side-effects that I'm not very concerned by) so I have to get certain meds without going through the docs(nothing that's restricted or a controlled substance)

Sometimes on forums people just don't have an answer. Then there's the issue that after a post has sat there for a number of weeks or months, people may wish to contribute, but don't want to resurrect an old thread.

I don't think I have ever posted on generic medical sites, but I have used more specific ones like Wrong Planet and psychforums.com. I do often encounter generic ones like patient.info in Google searches though.