Skip to main content

Google it Right!

Image
By



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.
Many doctors are still outraged by the cheekiness of patients trying to cross-check or “spy” on their “wisdom” reflecting a bygone attitude of “paternalistic” medicine.
I consider “Google” a useful repository of information, and 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!
1. Look carefully at the source of information. What shows up immediately as soon as you type the search words and click the return button are usually advertisements and “promotional” sites.
2. Most reliable ones would have .edu or .net or .org after them, suggesting that these belong to educational or other reliable organizations. The ones with .com are usually commercial and are likely to be biased.
3. 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 realize that one of the rare causes is cancer of the colon.
4. 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.
5. 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. This is what the doctor does for you.
6. Don’t form your opinions based on what you see on social media. These are usually individual opinions or promotional in nature. If one aggrieved relative shrieks about the tragic death of his father from cardiac arrest after a surgery for colon cancer, it should not make us change our decisions in another patient, just as we would not stop driving on the road because of one reported accident.
7. The conditions and outcomes posted in social media are often the worst as good happy outcomes are rarely reported.
8. 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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Teaching and Learning – is there a trick?

By
One of the big mistakes that we as parents and teachers often make, and that could stifle the mental development of our children, is to treat them as just small adults! In fact, it is this attitude of grown-ups that could be leading our next generation to become stereotyped conformists rather than original thinkers and innovators. And if we intend to drive home health messages and inculcate healthy habits we need to tailor our efforts to their cognitive potential. That children indeed think and discover the world differently was first noticed by a Swiss scientist Jean Piaget in the early 20th century. He studied his own three children grow and was intrigued by how they behaved, played games and learnt at different ages. With further observations and experiments, he propounded the theory of ‘cognitive development’, placed great importance on the education of children and is hailed even today, 30 years after his death, as a pioneer of the constructive theory of knowing.  He...
1 comment
Read more

The Doctor’s Dress

By
The familiar white coat worn by physicians as their distinctive dress for over 100 years, has started generating  murmurs  of controversy. It is not uncommon to find the blood pressure to be higher when measured by a white-coat-wearing-doctor in the hospital or clinic than the readings obtained at home by relatives.  This is due to the anxiety that the white coat and the hospital setting evokes in patients, and has been termed “White Coat Hypertension”. Mature clinicians often routinely subtract a few points from these measurements when entering records in case charts or calculating the dose of anti-hypertensive medications to be prescribed. The white coat scares children too.  Kids often express their dislike for this dress by crying and screaming and by denying access to their bellies or chest for examination by paediatricians in this attire. Many pediatricians across the world have folded up their white coats and taken to informal colourful dressing to...
2 comments
Read more

Questions from a Doctor’s Life

By
There is hardly any person in Uttar Pradesh who has not heard of Dr D K Chhabra, a senior neurosurgeon, who died recently. Over the decades his expertise, pragmatic advice and popularity had broken the shackles of his narrow surgical field coming to be known as a “brain-specialist”and a genuine adviser for all health problems. I got to know him in 1987 when I joined the upcoming Sanjay Gandhi PG Institute of Medical Sciences (SGPGI) in Lucknow as a young member of the faculty in Gastroenterology. He had moved from his alma mater the KG Medical College where he is still regarded as a legend. An omnipresent bachelor doctor living in the duty room readily available to help anybody anytime.He was tasked to heading and developing Neurosciences at SGPGI. He had an eye for detail and was tasked additionally by the director to set up not just his department, but the whole hospital, the building, equipment and the campus. DKC was a tall and handsome man who spoke little. But when he did inl...
1 comment
Read more