Medical Internet Literacy

That's a literacy issue. Internet literacy can be taught.

What I would have liked to have seen at the start of the pandemic:

• Some official health organization, such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) or National Institutes of Health (NIH), puts together tutorials and information packets somewhere on the internet educating people about well-established health protocols you can implement at home to try to care for yourself without heading to the ER.
• Instead of people trying to create lynch mobs and the like for those folks pursuing remedies like Ivermectin, the government and the general populace meets such interest with policies that tolerate people exploring such if they wish (and provides guidelines to minimize harm) but also reminds them "This is not recommended by a reliable source." and points people to home healthcare protocols put together by medical professionals and published on reputable sites.

People were turning to things like Ivermectin in part because they felt helpless and wanted to be able to DO something and the government was, on the one hand, telling them "Try to NOT go to the hospital if at all possible" and on the other hand was doing little or nothing to help them take care of themselves at home.

If you really want people to stay home and not overwhelm your hospitals, you should give them the tools to do so successfully. This step was entirely overlooked.

My understanding is that in ancient Rome, at some point they published the laws on a wall or something in a public building or something. The result: Literacy rates for the peasantry shot through the roof.

The reason: Peasants did not trust their overlords and wanted to read it for themselves when they had a dispute with someone.

The pandemic was a huge missed opportunity to improve medical internet literacy by having reputable sources put out home healthcare protocols instead of leaving it up to schmucks like me to stick their neck out, get pilloried and etc while folks then passed around shit home remedies with poor info that put people in harm's way.

I should have never been put in a position to feel compelled to stick my neck out knowing from long experience that tends to go badly. I did so because official healthcare organizations were dropping the ball on a very obvious opportunity to educate people via internet, which is a means to do so without sharing germs.

One of the criticisms I got today about internet literacy was someone saying that big name famous people were promoting a lot of nonsense: Just a sampling of educated people who were pushing this bullshit: Elon Musk (Stanford grad school dropout), Dr Drew (USC MD), Bret Weinstein (UMich PhD), Harvey Risch (Yale).

Yeah, so, if Celine Dion came to your house and advised you what to do about your plumbing issue, would you disregard the advice of a licensed plumber and say "But some famous singer said I should do X, so I'm doing X"?

Medical internet literacy means that "the little people" know to whom they should listen, such as sites run by the CDC and NIH, sites that end in .edu and .gov and not every blowhard who has a few million followers on Twitter or fans for their music or movies.

People who are famous should make some effort to stay in their lane. It is irresponsible for someone with millions of followers who doesn't actually know more medically to actively promote unproven alternative remedies and the world should be educated about that fact.

And it's hard to do that because sometimes people really are very knowledgeable about X without having a formal background in it. In my case, it's because I LIVE WITH a deadly medical condition, so my life depends on this knowledge.

Anyway, famous people ought to be able to share anecdotes and personal opinions. They shouldn't be excluded from that based on fame:

It's his personal site. It says so in big, bold letters across the top of the site: Richard Stallman's Personal Site.
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If you don't care what the hell he thinks about every random social topic, stop reading every random thing he writes about random social stuff.
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And people are continuing to have a cow about a post like this?! That's not his fault. That's other people being ridiculous.

If you are an Ordinary Joe and people are forwarding you bullshit from celebrities about medical topics, a best policy is to flat out ignore it if at all humanly possible. If that is not possible, I recommend you let people know with as little drama as possible "This is not a reliable source of medical info. I don't care to spend time on this."

Personal anecdotes are not, per se, nefarious as long as they are treated like a single data point and NOT given more weight due to the unrelated fame or wealth of the person. It is, however, problematic when famous and wealthy people want to insist they are right and you MUST listen to them and agree with their often cockamamie conclusions because they have power and are used to cramming things down everyone's throat and more or less getting away with that.

That's very dangerous behavior. And we are currently doing a poor job of handling it.

The solution is not insisting people shut up. The solution is, in part, helping "the little people" put their brains in gear and stop being all starry eyed because a famous person said it.

Fame and money do not, per se, confer medical expertise. Conflating smarts in one area for smarts in other unrelated areas is always problematic, even when it isn't medical, it's just more likely to be actually deadly when it is medical.