Google it right!

If you are one of those who resort to Google for your health problems, you are not the only one. Almost anyone who has access to the Internet does it nowadays, either to find out what their symptoms suggest, discover remedies and side effects, learn about “illnesses”, hunt for the right doctor or hospital, and sometimes to track if the treatment is going right.

There is sometimes a mismatch between the patient and the doctor on how savvy they both are. Many doctors are still outraged by the cheekiness of patients trying to crosscheck or “spy” on their “wisdom” reflecting a bygone attitude of “paternalistic” medicine.

I consider “Google” the inevitable new factor in patient-doctor relationship, and am OK with it, as long as, ….and that is important, as long as my patients Google it right!

Here are a few tips to do it well:

1.If you wish to Google symptoms, such as “constipation” it is fine. Most reliable sites will provide a large amount of information about its causes and management. When you go down the list, you will however realise that one of the rare causes is cancer of the colon.

2.If however you put two search terms such as “constipation” and a diagnostic term such as “colon cancer”, most of what will appear on the screen will seem to convey that you might have developed the bad disease. Hence confine your initial search to the symptom, and not its association with a diagnostic term.

3.Putting the information in a proper perspective is the most important bit. For example, if a young person has been suffering from “constipation” for several years, it is almost invariably going to be due to faulty eating (less amount of dietary fiber, consumption of constipating medicines or food items) or sluggish movement of the colon. If however the same symptom occurs for the first time in an elderly person, is associated with rectal bleeding and loss of weight, the chances of the cause being colon cancer goes up.

4.Look carefully at the source of information. Most reliable sites would have .edu or .net or .org after them, suggesting that these are sites belonging to educational or other reliable organisations. The ones with .com are usually commercial and are likely to be biased.

5.Don’t form your opinions based on what you see on social media. These are usually individual opinions or promotional in nature. For instance, if one post from an aggrieved relative shrieks about the tragic death of his father from cardiac arrest after a surgery for colon cancer, it should not make me waver to offer the treatment to another elder, if that is indeed the appropriate one for him. The conditions and outcomes posted in social media are often the worst as good happy outcomes are rarely reported.

6.Do not hesitate to discuss what you have found on the net with your doctor. He will probably help you to navigate through the difficult paths that of a balanced clinical decision-making.