"Doctor, I read it on Google"

As I observed earlier when writing about Emerging Trends in Healthcare, the relative knowledge levels are changing rapidly in the physician-patient relationship. In the past, the physician was clearly the expert and the patient simply accepted the doctor's judgement and counsel without question.
 
Today's web-savvy Healthcare consumers, however, are adept at finding comprehensive and detailed information about their own condition and disease. In many ways, in fact, they have an advantage over the doctor - a patient only has to learn about one particular condition (or a few); whereas a physician, even a specialist, must necessarily cover a far wider range of medical knowledge.

By and large, most doctors are uncomfortable with this sudden shift in patient knowledge level and the potential for second-guessing the doctor's opinion, that goes with it. New research from Microsoft suggests that the doctors may be right!

Microsoft Research has just published an article on this topic: Cyberchondria: Studies of the Escalation of Medical Concerns in Web Search. The study authors found that patients who perform Web Searches about their symptoms, tend to have an exaggerated sense of their illness. Says the article:

However, the Web has the potential to increase the anxieties of people who have little or no medical training, especially when Web search is employed as a diagnostic procedure.
...
We show that escalation is influenced by the amount and distribution of medical content viewed by users,

Overall, though, this finding is hardly surprising. As any layperson who has ever perused a medical encyclopedia knows, just reading about the specific symptoms for any random disease makes one start to start imagine those very same symptoms - it is part of the human condition! Obviously the same thing happens when patients read medical information online.

At the same time, there is a distinct upside for patient health in having all of this medical information easily available and accessible to all. Informed patients are in a better position to understand what is happening to them; they can handle it better and can take better care of themselves in addressing their own health problems.

In any case, this is a one-way street. The genie is out of the bottle now and patients will be increasingly better-informed in the future. Whether this is preferable or not, physicians had better gear up to deal with this change.

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Comments

[Hope Leman]

Thanks for the link to the PDF of the article. Very helpful to be able to read the actual report. I was particularly interested by the authors' example of the fact that many of those who are experiencing muscle twitching start researching amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in depth even though muscle twitching can be evidence of much less serious illnesses. The authors regard that phenomenon as not necessarily a good thing, given that ALS is such a dire condition. But I see that as a positive, given that early diagnosis of ALS is so crucial in the initiation of treatment with the one drug that sees to somewhat increase survival rates, Riluzole. I would think that is better for people to have the option of reading about depressing possibilities than to remain perplexed and frustrated.

[NCPLH Personal License]

That was sooo interesting!
Great that part about the "placebo effect", I know a number of people that the more they read about ilnesses the more they feel sick theirselves! Incredible! Google is great to find answers, it really is, but we need to remember that anyone can write on the internet, any layperson in this world. we should trust what we read and not trust it at the same time. just trying to keep it real, that's all
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[Dental Simi Valley]

This is really an interesting post. Yes, there are lots of people gets anxious about their condition when they looked it up over the internet. It may give them some anxiety or fear, but this will make the doctor a hard time convincing one patient to undergo a certain procedure. On the lighter side of it, the patient becomes aware of his own condition, but not in a properly manner. Doctors are now faced with a challenge on how to manage this kind of patient.

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Informed patients are in a better position to understand what is happening to them; they can handle it better and can take better care of themselves in addressing their own health problems.

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I think it's true that web can cause unnecessary anxiety to a person, but at the same time people are being aware of a certain condition which will lead them to take care more of their health.

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