Why crowdsourcing treatment advice almost never works

It’s exhausting when you don’t have a system to work within. When every patient that comes in is like starting over and not knowing what to do. Every treatment is guesswork and not knowing if something will work, or why it did one time and not another. Or worse yet, why what you’ve used before flared up this new patient.

Too often practitioners work on assumptions or guessing. They base treatment on what worked for a past patient, or because a colleague said it worked on their patient.

And much of these recommendations come from Crowdsourcing for treatment advice on social media. I started a group that has over 7500 members. But I had to get away from it.

The issue is, absent using a working system, crowdsourcing is ineffectual at best, and reckless at worse. It was the same thing over and over. Tons of people hopping in offering random suggestions absent any real case history, and it was all piecemeal. It was unhelpful and only confused the practitioner who posted the original question even more. The practitioner wasn’t taught how to fish. They were just fed temporarily. But even worse, the fish wasn’t even edible. (Ok enough analogies)

Can you imagine if your patient knew you were trying some random technique because another practitioner offered advice on Facebook?! When you think about it that way it’s pretty crazy.

But asking for advice CAN be helpful when it’s done in a certain way. Asking questions on a forum is much more valuable when it’s within a system and we’re speaking the same language. You can build within a system. You can make sense of the patient when you have a base of knowledge to work from. When someone posts a history of the patient, better advice can be offered. This also helps practitioners grow and not just have a crutch. I want practitioners to ask questions and learn more than just “here try this”. It’s much better to know the why and empower them to be more self sufficient…to grow into getting the answers themselves and knowing how to find them. Offering treatment advice is much more profound in this way.

A forum works much better this way and it works extremely well on our Locals community, where EXSTORE is the system that everyone works under. Its just a more responsible - and very effective - way of running a forum.

Size doesn’t matter. Having a smaller more effective community is better. The community continues to grow, but not just for the sake of growth.