Surprise, Suprise, People Check Medical Info Online
from the good-and-bad... dept
I doubt this will surprise anyone, but it turns out that both before and after visiting the doctor, many people look up medical information online. To be honest, I'm surprised that it's only about 25% of people. As pointed out in the article, this is both good and bad. It's good that people are getting more information and not just taking the word of their doctor. However, it can be bad if the information they're looking at is not credible or even harmful.
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self diagnosis
As the medical industry dumbs itself down and spends less time with patients, it becomes more obvious that, armed with a little information, we can do better for ourselves. We only need Doctors to call in the prescription for many "low urgency" conditions. Doctors and the insurance industry are in the process of putting a lot of doctors out of business.
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No Subject Given
Also, perhaps we need to give doctors a bit less credit. There are good doctors and bad doctors and doctors make mistakes more frequently than most people realise. Sometimes doctors make decisions based on money, not helping the patient to get better.
A prescription I was taking resulted in a side effect that my doctor told me was unrelated. I checked at an online forum, only to discover that a lot of people were reporting this. When I told my doctor about this, he did some research and discovered that was true.
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