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Doctors Seeing a Rise In "Google-itis"
It's one of the fastest-growing health issues that doctors now face: "Google-itis." Everyone from concerned mothers to businessmen on their lunch break are typing in symptoms and coming up with rare diseases or just plain wrong information. Many doctors are bringing computers into examination rooms now so they can search along with patients to alleviate their fears. "I'm not looking for a relationship where the patient accepts my word as the gospel truth," says Dr. James Valek. "I just feel the Internet brings so much misinformation to the (exam) room that we have to fight through all that before we can get to the problem at hand."
I think every website that lists all these varied diseases should put a rarity score next to each illness. That way when you think you've got Wilson's disease, you can look and see with a simple number how unlikely it is.
for those scientifically oriented, and aware of our natural cognitive bias, it is a fantastic tool to pin down the real problem, bringing relevant information to discuss with a doctor.
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That is has been a problem of sorts since the bombardment of TV and print ads for Rx drugs. Why do they feel they need to advertise them? You can't just go and buy them OTC.
"There might be intelligent beings created by God in outer space even if there are none here on Earth." -Anonymous
This.
The dirty truth that's seldom told is: Your doctor doesn't know any better than you do. He or she is making highly educated guesses, and that's about the end of it.
Your tribal witchdoctor of years past had less knowledge, but was doing the exact same thing. Science came along and made medicine less of a guessing game, but it can never remove it completely.
From TFA:
No longer is it between a doctor who knows all and a parent who knows nothing.
Show me the doctor who genuinely 'knows all' and I'll show you a miracle worker. It simply doesn't work that way, never has, and I'm sorry if it makes some practitioners sad that the patients have more tools.
As in the case above, however, this is genuinely a good thing for us all.
Not sure that's a counter, actually; I don't think that's the kind of behavior doctors are concerned about. When your wife found the evidence that she may have been misdiagnosed, she went to her doctor to confirm it and get his opinion; she didn't dismiss him as a quack and go all homeopathic on him, or assume that he was an idiot and stop taking his advice seriously.
Family doctors are pretty much useless. Why do I need to book for an appointment, wait like 30-40mins at the clinic even though I have an appointment, and only able to talk to the doctor for 5mins?
I went to do my annual check-up with the family doctor a year ago, and I complained to him about my day-time sleepiness. The doctor simply dismissed it as "bored at work". I basically had to google the symptom myself afterward to discover that I might have sleep-apnea, and then book another appointment to tell the family doctor to just give me a referral to see a sleep specialist to do more comprehensive test. Lord and behold, my self-diagnose was confirmed by the sleep lab, and I even knew that the treatment would be CPAP before the sleep doctor suggested it.
The point of the story is, yes, there will be paranoid people who suspect they are dying of rare diseases because of their headache and whine to their doctor all day. For most people, they are better off googling their own symptom first, get a general understanding of what could be the cause of it, so that you can better talk to your family doctor on what test to do and which specialist to see.
Hey, you don't go to see a car salesman before doing your homework, why go see your doctor without getting a better idea of your own health?
I don't think you understand. Your wife is a rarity.
I am not a doctor. I am studying to be one. I talk to a lot of doctors. The patients who come in who have diagnosed themselves correctly, or close to correctly, such as getting the 'genus' of a disorder or disease correct while the 'species' is incorrect, are so rare that they tend to remember them.
Compare it to a Help Desk worker -- how many callers, per centum, do you think that Help Desk worker gets who would call up, have a correct or nearly so idea about what is wrong, and be calling only to get instructions on how to fix it?
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"Qua!?"
Ok, I don't have any hard data, but it seems to me that in reality today for every patient with mis-informed "Googleitis" there are ten or more people who are getting better medical care because they are informed about their condition or even have already correctly self-diagnosed. Some of the comments right here to point.
But doctors are upset because they are not used to having informed patients. They are used being the godlike arbitors of secret knowledge whose judgement will be trusted 100% because of their degree. But in reality of course they are human and all too fallible, and even more so nowadays that they are increasingly simply pharmaceutical salesmen rather than healers and don't really have or take the time to actually know their patients.
Before doctors found it easy to be confident... because hardly anyone ever questioned them. Now things are getting a bit more difficult. Poor doctors? I'm finding it difficult to be sympathetic.
There may be a lot of information of questionable quality on the Net, but overall I have not a shred of doubt that the empowerment the Net has brought to the individual in this regard has been a boon to public health.
"Guessing"? To say that medical practitioners, as a whole, are "guessing" is incredibly naive. Does the bridge engineer guess on the load bearing capacity? Does the auto mechanic guess what the appropriate timing is on your timing belt? What about an airline pilot navigating from one airport to another and landing safely? No, no, and no. They use KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE, TOOLS, and INTUITION.
Likening these traits to a medical professional:
Guessing? While there may be those at the lower end of the spectrum that may lack in some of these areas, to generalize so is unfair and misinformed.