Those were the good old days before the appearance of the web, and more frequently than not, I found myself poring over health mags, leaflets of new anti acne drugs and participating in talks with close friends and family members. While scanning through assorted sites I stumbled on a link that led on to an online acne forum. Now this is a revolutionary development that I sorely wish I had in those days!
An acne forum of any sort, even if only off line, would have helped me deal with not only the physical evidence of acne, but also with the fear and humiliation that acne brought on. So, I dug into the acne forum with relish to see what developments had taken place in the acne field. The journey left me with varied results.
On the one hand, there had been a powerful expansion in the quantity of info available in the acne forum to give even an informal reader all of the hard facts about acne. For example, one of the acne forums I went to tore apart some of the acne myths that we all grew up with.
This actual forum for instance conclusively set to rest the long time belief that acne was the result of poor facial cleanliness. The acne forum didn’t do so through lengthy debates, but instead, the acne forum was identified by applicable systematic facts, clear reasons and plenty of concrete, real life examples. Another thing that I found in the acne forum was that a large percentage of the par takers were way better informed than back in my time. Thanks to the forum, they were well supplied with the data and the resources to deal with their acne related issues.
But some of the other sides of the acne forums set me thinking. In one of these acne forums for example, I found a partaker giving out all sorts of confusing claims. Some of the data he doled out was right, but on the other hand some of it contradicted accurate information. Eventually, anybody going thru this acne forum would be more confused than informed. I also revealed that these forums had become a type of hang out for the depressed, the embarrassed and the plain ill informed.
These folks, instead of focusing on getting the necessary data and recommendation to cope with their acne issues, changed into a source of fear and humiliation for all of the others. Not only were they worried about their own issues, they were spreading all sorts of negative info about acne generally and cooking up conspiracy hypotheses to frighten of the others as well.
All in all, I concluded that while such forums were crucial to spread info about acne, they could also shock folks by including some unwanted elements. I am fairly certain that the technology exists to hunt down and eliminate such unwanted elements and hope that may be done earlier than later for the bigger common good of all acne forums.