Look Up New Illness? Go to Wikipedia. Not.
I don't know if you're like me but when I get a new symptom or diagnosis from a doctor, I rush online to check out what it is. Usually, Wikipedia comes up first, and even though I knew better, I usually believe whatever it says. Now doctors are saying that a lot of that information is just, well, wrong. "I think that's the double-edged sword of Wikipedia," Dr. Amin Azzam tells NPR's Arun Rath, as reported at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). "Because anyone can edit, we don't necessarily know the expertise of the people doing the editing. One the other hand, the reason it's so popular is because everyone can contribute." Azzam is a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. He teaches a course that encourages fourth-year medical students to use their knowledge to improve Wikipedia, one article at a time, as RWJF notes. Azzam tells NPR there's a lot of room for improving the quality of Wiki...