Imagine this scenario:
You go to the doctor and he says "I'm sorry, there's no reasonable cure for your condition. It'll be with you the rest of your life, and you just have to ignore it. I'm sorry. However, some people find that a daily dose of snake oil helps. You can give it a try if you want."
So you go home, with a heavy heart, but you know that you're an engineer / salesperson / mechanic / person on extended involuntary holiday (possibly seeking employment) / whatever and that he's a doctor. He knows best. So you go and buy some snake oil and start taking your daily supplement with your cornflakes in the morning.
Then one day you think, "Gosh, this snake oil is rather expensive stuff. I wonder how it works." So you open up Google and to your horror you read that snake oil does nothing, except for rare causes of earlobe inflammation in pregnant women on extended submarine voyages. Furthermore, you read that 81% of doctors admit to prescribing placebo medications and that the preferred method is to advise people to take snake oil. But you also read the the placebo effect can make a big improvement to people in a surprisingly large number of cases. But now you know that it's just a placebo and you think it won't work and you can't bear to buy useless things. You can understand the doctor's perspective, but you're kinda annoyed that he lied to you, after all the confidence you put in him.
So what do you do?
Don't do the Google search in the first place.
Peter
