You’re Sick. Now What? Knowledge is Power.

Oncologist Marisa Weiss’s advice to those inclined to research their own medical care: it’s mandatory. “The time you have with your doctor is getting progressively shorter, yet there’s so much more to talk about. You have to prepare for this important meeting.” This New York Times special section, Decoding Your Health, offers useful advice on evaluating what you might find: a primer on interpreting medical studies shows that “no matter how compelling and exciting a hypothesis is, we don’t know whether it works without clinical trials”; and self-diagnosis via the internet may well prove you have a fool for a doctor.