Paging Dr. Google for my MRI diagnosis
All sorts of trouble is up for grabs on the internet, but the website that seems to get me into the most trouble is Web MD.
Medical professionals roll their eyes at folks like me.
“Stop consulting Dr. Google,” my general practitioner advises. “He’s usually wrong.”
The ability to search the World Wide Web for solutions to imagined or real medical problems is nothing new, but I fear our desire to personally influence our own care is a doubleedged sword. Before I explain how I spent last weekend diagnosing MRI images of my own brain, I want to say that I believe strongly in advocating for one’s own medical care. We know our bodies really well and taking good care of them means speaking up and asking for what we need.
Access to an online universe of knowledge has its pros, like the time I fed my baby bananas and panicked at the subsequent poop color. Fellow paranoid infant caregivers will know that bananafed baby poop is disgusting in new and unusual ways. Dr. Google saved us a visit to the emergency room with his very clear data on baby poop varieties. But the web’s answers to a new and persistent spasm in my cheek were worrisome.
I took my concerns to my doctor in the hopes that she’d prescribe me Botox. Instead, she asked me a number of weird questions about headaches and ordered me to take an MRI. Two weeks later, my mother and I went to some MRI lab in San Francisco’s Laurel Village. Mom has had MRIs on her knee, which in our family makes her an expert. “It’s very loud in there,” she warned, cracking open a waiting room magazine. I suspected that she would sneak away to Starbucks instead of dutifully and audibly praying while I got my brain scan.
After the loud MRI, I was told to stop by the front desk on my way out for a CD of my brain. Indeed, I was handed what looked like a DVD with my name and birthday stamped on it.
“Your doctor will call you with results in a few days,” I was told.
I leaned across the front desk and whispered, “But I’m going to look at this. What if I see ... a tumor?”
No one really had an answer for me. They simply handed me pictures of the inside of my brain and wished me well.
My mother insisted I ignore the disc because I would “absolutely find something to panic about,” but I barely made it through the front door before popping that disk into my laptop. The amount of time it takes a layperson to look at images of their own brain and feel informed enough to diagnose problems is about four minutes.
I found two suspicious “dots” and spent the next 72 hours Googling what I thought I saw floating around in my skull. I took iPhone photos of my laptop screen and texted them to friends in the medical industry.
“Everyone does this now,” a nurse pal responded. “It drives us nuts.”
Web MD actually published an article titled “Internet Makes Hypochondria Worse” which seems really hypocritical to me. But it’s true. According to a study in the BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal), internet symptom checkers (folks like me) will find the correct diagnosis to their malady within the first three search results only 51% of the time. The study also noted that symptom checkers were given the correct triage advice (go to the hospital, relax, take a Tylenol, etc.) just 57% of the time.
So basically, Dr. Google is right about half the time. Those odds are pure trash when it comes to my brain, which, while flawed in numerous ways, ended up being medically “normal.” My weird cheek is likely a result of stress and sleep deprivation, not the numerous diseases presented to me by the internet.
I maintain that the lab should not have given me a CD of my brain before a radiologist had a chance to analyze it, despite the fact that I own my own medical records and should have full access to them. Some of us can’t be trusted not to peek at test results. In the modern world where dummies like me can search billions of medical problems from the convenience of our smartphones, it seems prudent to present the patient with a professional diagnosis before giving them carte blanche on the information superhighway.
And I still never got that prescription for Botox.
I whispered about my brain CD, “But I’m going to look at this. What if I see ... a tumor?”