
I’d bet my next squirt of nitro spray that, if only the Emergency physician who misdiagnosed my heart attack symptoms as acid reflux had bothered to Google: “central chest pain, nausea, sweating and pain radiating down left arm” before sending me home, there is only one plausible search result that he and Dr. Such a perfect example of why and when people turn to Google for useful help. I held his hand and stayed.įiled Under: trends & principles Tagged With: Google
#Don t confuse your google search with my medical degree how to
It was about having the information I needed to make my own choices about how to spend that day. That’s not what that Google search was about. I was alone in the room with him at the time Mom and the nurses were taking a break. On what turned out to be the last day of my Dad’s life, I used Google to search: “what does dying look like.” Dad met nearly every sign and symptom. What story would you tell someone who doubts that the internet is useful - even essential - to navigating health care? It could be big or small, life-changing or not. What evidence do skeptics need to read in order to catch up to us on the path of understanding? How might we respectfully change their minds?īeyond data, let’s hear some stories about how a search online has led to information that helped you in some way with your health or in taking care of someone else. If you’ve got a favorite study or article to cite, please share it. What I’d like to do is open a thread about our answers to these naysayers. For some people their best hope is to connect online with other people who share their symptoms, diagnosis, or life stage. Google is, for many Americans, a de facto second opinion. The vast majority of Americans of all ages have access to the internet and the majority say they have looked online for health information.

– contribution to the public conversation has generally been national survey data showing that the horse is out of the barn on this one, at least in the U.S. Best outcomes arise when doctors and patients work together with respect. As chair of the national committee he said I’d turned his career on its head and would write a BMJ article. – consultant once agreed to carry out a test to disprove my hypothesis. No, the international journal of surgical pathology actually, I said and offered him the article to read. My consultant sneered at one of my questions and wondered if I had read it in the Daily Mail. There’s nothing in the literature about it hurting.” – LoomesGill Her response: “It’s not supposed to hurt. After dx, I asked the geneticist if we could now discuss pain management. – have a condition that’s so rare that none of my specialists has seen it before. Yet, we constantly face scientific and medical professionals whose credentials we want to trust but whose information has been greatly misinformed. We tend to love certainty and support science. This is one of the heartbreaks about being autistic. That tweet touched off an epic thread of over 500 replies, people sharing their stories about living in the unmapped regions of medicine. Here’s one fabulous reply, written by Trisha Greenhaigh:ĭon’t confuse the 1-hour lecture you had on my condition with my 20 years of living with it. Today I found out that there’s a doctor who sings about it in English and in Swedish. It appears on Facebook, on Twitter, on coffee mugs, and on signs in doctor’s offices.

Every few weeks someone posts some version of “Don’t confuse your Google search with my medical degree.”
