Why are people paying this guy to go on a free trip to Japan?
The news from the conference will be made public anyway.
The guy getting the free trip probably thinks its hilarious.
This is wrong on so many levels that it's hard to know where to even begin explaining why it's wrong, but I'll list some of the reasons.
1. Is it a certainty that the media will report EVERY detail that we want to know about from the Congress? No. Is it even a certainty that the media will report ANY of the information from the Congress? No. Afro_Vacancy put it best when he said,
"He's not going to a Lebron James summit. This is an academic/scientific meeting. At any given time there are dozens of these taking place and most of them are ignored by the media, or reduced to a single paragraph." And Hellouser correctly pointed out that,
"Media didn't report on any anything from (the) Miami (Hair Loss Congress)". Hellouser went to the Miami Hair Loss Congress back in 2015 and he brought back a lot of information. And he's right that the media didn't report any of it.
None.
2. Even if the media does show up and does a story about the information at the Congress media stories about these events are always short and superficial, without good detail. The media doesn't get answers to lots of questions. The info Hellouser would bring back will be up-to-the-minute and detailed. He will get the answer to almost every question every one of us wants answered. Medical journals will also publish a good level of info but that will happen numerous months after Hellouser gives us his information, or the information might never be published in medical journals at all.
3. Even if we don't send someone to the Congress the researchers will still release a lot of information (during their presentations) but if we don't have someone there to collect information for us how will that information get back to you if the media only does some short shallow story on it, or worse yet, if the media does no reporting on it at all? Do you have a video feed from the event to your residence?
4. Plus, when we send someone to the Congress that person always manages to do private interviews with the researchers and get even more detailed information than the researchers disclose in their presentations. But of course Hellouser can only do those interviews if he's there.
5. Hellouser has established a rapport with a lot of the research groups and the researchers know he's there as a representative of a bunch of hair loss sufferers so the researchers may feel some empathy for him (since he's one of the people the researchers are trying to cure) and open up a little more than they would for a media reporter.
6. Hellouser is very motivated to do the best possible job because he himself wants the information because of his own hair loss. To media reporters it's just another day at the mill. And again, media reporters may ignore the event.
7. Hellouser is very informed and astute about everything related to hair loss so he's going to ask all the right questions and he's going to pick up on every last significant detail and nuance. Again, these media reports of these types of events are usually superficial and short if the media even bothers to do stories about these events at all.
8. Hellouser will get detailed updated information back to us during the congress and shortly after the congress. This information will be up-to-the minute and usually even includes late-breaking news.
9. I would not call this a trip in the sense of it being a vacation. I would not want to do what Hellouser is going to do. Will he have some time to check out some of the local sights? A little bit, but it will also be a lot of work. It will be nothing but work during the daylight hours. And he's going to be tired at night. And he's going to start out tired from the trip to get there. At the Congress he's going to be rushed, loaded down with equipment, racing around from presentation to presentation and from presentation to interview, gathering information, keeping us updated, and putting a lot of effort into organizing all of the information for the rest of us to review. Here in
italics is Hellouser giving a short description of all of the fun he had when he went to the Miami Hair Loss Congress:
"Sitting in presentations all day long, doing interviews, taking notes and pictures of scientific posters and then compiling it all in dozens of threads with youtube videos of recordings AFTER the congress isn't really a vacation. It's work. A lot of it. For Miami I had to give up my vacation days to do it."
10. He's also putting some of his own money into the project and he's using his vacation leave from work to do this.
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