We have a few questions tagged health on the site, and most of them concern issues that come up during gaming. Only one of these questions actually pertains to health in game (the type that's represented by our beloved logo). There was recently a short discussion concerning potential liability in giving answers to these questions, but this didn't cover whether or not these questions were considered off-topic.
I think that we need to examine whether or not these questions are within our site scope. Early on in the beta, we decided that we would avoid questions concerning legality because there are several issues regarding not only liability, but also being too localized, and therefore were outside of what we could reasonably cover in scope. I feel that health/medical issues also suffer from these same issues.
Problems with allowing medical questions
- Legal liability - We have already determined that We Are Not Lawyers. We Are Also Not Doctors (aside from @badp). We do not have expertise that would trump consulting an actual medical physician.
- Subjectivity and localization - What may work to ease gaming sickness symptoms for one person may not work for another. There are far, far more variables concerning health and the human body than compared to even shopping recommendations or game rec!
- List of X and inaccurate voting problems - As tzenes noted in comments here, a big problem with health questions is this:
people will vote for things that they think have worked (regardless if it has) or sounds like it might work (without even trying it); as a result, the quality answers do not float.
. These questions tend to invite "one solution per answer" type answers, which people then vote on based on what they think will work, regardless of actual experience. Drive-by votes then tend to favor older answers and the ones that already have the most upvotes, and lead to a divide that is not based on quality, but rather opinion polling. - Prone to lead to extended discussion - These types of questions usually involve asking a lot of questions on the answerer's part. Do you have proper lighting? Do you adjust your monitor brightness at all? Does it happen when you do X but not Y? etc. It's already been established that the SE system is not ideal for discussions and we don't really want extended discussions taking place in back-and-forth comments. We are not a forum, and these questions are often best suited for forums.