Dr Google is terrifying, says Nick Robinson

♦ Doctors need to arm their patients with better information about cancer survival to stop them becoming “terrified” by “Dr Google”, Nick Robinson, the BBC journalist, has said.

The Today presenter, who was treated for lung cancer in 2015, said oncologists were failing to adapt to the digital revolution, leaving patients at the mercy of online statistics.

Mr Robinson said his own research on Google and Wikipedia had left him “anxious and depressed”, and that online statistics had made him wrongly believe he had just a one per cent chance of survival.

He told an audience of oncologists at the Britain Against Cancer conference: “Those survival statistics that anyone diagnosed with cancer instantly looks for almost always don’t apply to you … you need to do more to educate patients how to understand the data.”