With the sheer volume of health information available online these days, much of it patently incorrect or blatantly misleading, it is increasingly difficult to separate the signal from the noise. Many of the people with the expertise to guide us through these swamps of pseudoscience have neither the time nor inclination to deal with the festering rot one frequently encounters online. And the lies of unusual size (L.O.U.S.’s – they most definitely exist!) that have somehow been propagated to the point where they are practically self-sustaining certainly don’t help.

One of the most rewarding things to me about practicing medicine is the opportunity to educate patients about the human body, and about their health. Sadly, even when patients make a good faith effort to learn on their own, they can be lead astray by the misinformation that is so easy to encounter online. And correcting these deep seated misbeliefs can be exhausting – not to mention that educating people one at a time, while potentially rewarding, is hardly efficient. I can certainly feel the pain of every doctor who has lost count of how many times she has had to explain that no, vaccines do not cause autism, or had to tell his patient that antibiotics don’t help when you have a cold.

But I still believe in science and, though grudgingly at times, I still believe in humanity. In fact it can be quite fascinating to learn and understand what scientific research can teach us about why people have trouble believing science in the first place!

So this blog is not just about debunking myths, although I am sure I will do that from time to time. And it is also not necessarily about educating people on the specifics of an individual medical condition or disease, although I’m sure I will do some of that, too. It is about how all of our biases, perceptions, ideas, and societal or cultural beliefs interact with the facts and can lead us to some puzzling mistakes about health and wellness, and how to sort through all of the noise to get at the heart of the matter. Welcome to the journey – and don’t forget to stop and smell the roses from time to time.