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."

Comments

For me the reason to do this, is...

[Hurricane78]

...that sadly doctors are mostly full of shit. What I mean is that they are so mind-boggingly arrogant, even when they are not even remotely up-to-date. An example is the typical 60-year-old doc who hasn’t had a further training for 30 years, but does still say “There is no cure.” instead of “I don’t know a cure (yet).”, as if he knew that there never ever could be a cure, ever, because if he doesn’t know it, it can’t exist.

My brother told me, that that is a big problem, and well-known as the god complex.

And that is not the worst part. The worst part is that doctors seem to have no interest at all in actually finding the cause, and removing it. Instead you get everything you need, to hide away the symptoms. Pain killers, and all kinds of pills that only “make it go away” as long as you take them. Half the doctors I had to do with even acted insulted, when I demanded that they pursuit the actual cause, and tell me what it is.

Nowadays I don’t even bother anymore, and just learn the stuff myself. I only go to a doctor if I need to do tests, for surgery, or for stuff that I can’t get without a doc signing it off.

Especially in everything brain- or behavior-related they still live in the dark ages.

Doctors Suck

[Doc Ruby]

There are some good doctors, but they're very few among the many who suck.

These days doctors mostly just see as many patients as they possibly can per hour, look for symptoms identified by drug corps, order standard tests run by labs and returned with diagnosis attached, then prescribe drugs. They're just gateways to testing and drug corps.

Of course they don't want to talk about what you googled. That just slows them down. And they often don't have any deeper understanding of the diagnosis and treatment they're charging for than google gave you.

We need more doctors, with rigorous periodic testing for them to keep their licenses. And published track records of their accuracy in diagnosis and treatment. Increase the supply to meet the demand, force them to compete with each other, watch quality increase as price decreases. And watch us all get healthier from it.