I’d say its more likely that they are vague because of regulations and liability.

IE you cant/shouldn’t give blanket medical advice and if you do you may be liable if someone has a bad outcome from the advice.

That's my point!

Regulations have been set up so you have to pay an AMA member to get any information that might be labeled "medical advice".

There is tons of medical advice. Wikipedia, cdc, health.gov, mayoclinic, webmd, Reddit forums, hacker news, etc.

You can even get fake diagnosis and fake healthcare from chiropractors who are allowed to advertise themselves as doctors, and fake medicine from naturopaths or whatever who are also allowed to call themselves doctor.

I am using fake to mean unsupported by evidence in the form of sufficiently blind trials and whatever else is needed to qualify as scientifically sound (not the same as FDA approved).

That chiropractors have good lobbyists that managed to carve out a lucrative regulatory niche doesn't really disprove my theory.

Are chiropractors part of the AMA? Or any of the other sources of medical advice I listed?

Pretty weak “regulation” when you can get a “doctor” to prescribe you herbs and spices for your illnesses. Not to mention the tech startups that hand out amphetamine prescriptions written after an online telegealth visit by remote physician assistants and nurse practitioners (see Cerebral and Done).

There might be some regulation to get paid by Medicare and Medicaid services, and some requirements by insurance companies, but that seems entirely reasonable. There is little regulation on who is allowed to give medical advice.

I suppose there are lots of possibilities, but regardless of steering, fees and visits, a non-expert is unlikely to be able to self-diagnose, read a bit of text, and come up with a treatment plan.

The problem isn't information availability, it's experience and interpretation which is not something you can do on an individual basis 'on the side', hence the expertise requirement. If the subject matter at hand was as simple to deal with as "see X, apply Y, get result Z", then that would be great. But as this is not an exact science, such a method does not truly exist, and therefore cannot be made effective in a listicle on a website or other medium.

They have already been experimenting with expert knowledge systems in hospitals for decades. I am not sure what the result of that is but I rarely ever hear of them anymore.

ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system

I’d assume that they are kept vague so that users keep browsing the website and never quite get an answer. WebMD doesn’t benefit if you actually make it to a doctor to look at that sketchy mole.