When are drug questions medical questions?

Question

We currently have two questions out there:

Consequences of smoking marijuana during pregnancy (especially first weeks)?
and
https://parenting.stackexchange.com/questions/18342/for-parents-who-want-children-is-there-any-affect-on-sperm-if-the-male-takes-zo

Both deal with:

• One parent taking a drug
• A question about how that drug will affect the pregnancy

The question about Zoloft was put on hold within a day, because it was off-topic. It was asking about a prescription drug (vs. recreational), and how it would affect the sperm's involvement with pregnancy.

The other question was about recreational marijuana, and how having smoked it would affect the pregnancy.

I don't understand how the marijuana question is still open. I don't begrudge those who partake, but I wonder if Parenting SE really wants to be the go-to place for such a question? (And the most upvoted answer is essentially: "Congrats, I did it too, so don't worry". It has no information actually pertaining the question.

I wonder if the type of drug asked in the question is affecting the judgment of whether or not this question is still open, and/or the quality of the answers.

If we replaced marijuana with: Alcohol, Zoloft, Lithium, Cocaine, etc., would it still be open? If so, what differentiate's one drug's effects being medical advice and another drug's effects not being medical advice?

Edit: Some more info, valid from when I posted this question:

The Zoloft question was only viewed 13 times in 18 hours before getting closed down. The marijuana question has been viewed over 1800 times in 2 days, and has received 4 VTCs at this moment.

Edit 2: Now the marijuana question closed as duplicate, which made me laugh. The original question was asked 6 months ago, and has been seen almost 5K times. 0 VTCs.

Answer 1

The reason I closed the zoloft question and not the marijuana one wasn't so much the type of the drug as the tense of the question. The answer to the zoloft question might potentially influence whether he will stop taking a drug that was prescribed by a doctor in the future. The marijuana questions are asking about something that happened in the past, and therefore cannot influence any medical decisions. The former is asking for advice. The latter is asking for comfort.

So while the zoloft question is clearly off topic, the marijuana one is more of a grey area. I don't use my mod powers to close those, but wouldn't cry if the community voted that way.

Answer 2

My opinion is that questions that should be closed hit several of these:

• Best answered by a medical professional
• Relate to an urgent or serious medical condition
• Overly specific to a particular set of symptoms/etc. that are uncommon
• Specific to a particular set of symptoms that are too common ("My baby has a fever")
• Are phrased to seek specific advice for making a decision about medical treatment
• Could involve risks to someone if the advice is followed

The zoloft question is borderline to me; I'd be okay with it being open AND okay with closing it, but I'd tend towards closing it the way it is currently phrased. It's asking something that should be asked of a doctor, and it's seeking specific advice for making a decision about medical treatment. We can't offer that advice, because we don't know why the person is taking Zoloft, so we can't understand what potential risks or benefits there would be to stopping it.

The marijuana question was better, in my opinion, because it's asking for advice that would be more appropriate for another parent to provide. It wasn't perfect, but I wouldn't have VtC if there wasn't a good duplicate there. While one (many) of the answer(s) were basically pushing for talking to a doctor, that was a good potential answer to that problem, rather than a reason to close the question. The debate over whether you should tell a doctor was a good example of why it was okay as a question, as opposed to the Zoloft question.

Ultimately, the possibility (or not) of answers other than "Ask your doctor" is probably the main reason I would vote to close Zoloft and leave open (other than duplicate, which it was) Marijuana. The zoloft question couldn't have been answered with anything that was substantially better than 'talk to your doctor', without some editing, because it was largely asking for that particular person.

That said, the Zoloft question could be reopened if it goes something like this:

I'm taking Zoloft, and have heard it has potential complications for women who are pregnant. Has its effect on men who wish to conceive a child with their wife been studied? Is there any information I should bring with me to my doctor when I go to discuss this with him/her?

That's answerable here, because it's entirely staying away from asking us to directly give medical advice to a specific person. I'd personally like to be very picky about these questions, and I realize I'm straying into a picky area by making this distinction - but I think you end up with better answers and better questions if you do it this way.

Answer 3

My opinion:

I disagree that the question on Zoloft's impact, if any, on sperm is asking for medical advice.

As the older question on marijuana shows, there is precedent for asking about chemicals and their impact on pregnancy. For other examples, see:

• What cheeses are okay for pregnant women to eat?

• Can contact with cat feces be harmful for pregnant women?

• Is it safe for pregnant women to be around someone smoking "e-cigarettes"?

I don't consider these to be "asking for medical advice" because they're not saying "should I do x?", but rather "what are the known impacts of x, so that I can make my own decisions based upon scientific evidence.

That being said, I find it troubling that the top two answers on the newer marijuana question (higher voted by a wide margin) don't provide any real meaningful evidence to the support the answers. Only the one even falls within our "back it up" policy, and that only barely (i.e. "I smoked during pregnancy" isn't terribly helpful for determining potential harm, which is what the OP seemed to be asking.

Note that our policy does state:

Please note that opinions shared here should be backed up either with a reference, or experiences that happened to you personally.

Answers that fail to meet those criteria, particularly on a question that is explicitly looking for concrete medical possibilities, should be either edited to include sources, or downvoted, not upvoted.

I'm not sure if these answers got upvoted because they were supportive, because of the specific topic (or a combination of the two), or if the consensus view of the community has changed enough since the original discussions that evidence-based answers are no longer considered important.

If the later case is true, then it is likely that we need to be much stricter on what constitutes off-topic due to "medical advice". If we hold ourselves to strict standards, through voting, editing, and what types of content we, as a community, encourage, then I feel we can be fairly lenient on the scope of topics. In fact, I think that this type of self-policing is crucial to our ability to grow as a site and eventually graduate. If we can be responsible in our curation of "expert-level advice", then we will attract expert-level participants.

However, if the trend persists of upvoting content that is essentially "don't worry, because why be negative?", then I have deep concerns about the future growth of this site.