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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  1. identicon
    Scott, 14 Feb 2003 @ 9:02am

    self diagnosis

    Three years ago I diagnosed myself(with info from the internet) with hepatitis after a misdiagnosis from a PA ("go home and rest- it's a virus").

    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.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    Al, 15 Feb 2003 @ 1:16am

    No Subject Given

    First of all, I think you can give adults some credit, people realise they need to verify facts that they might read online, they know to take some comments with a pinch of salt. Although I'm sure there are a minority of high profile stories that go against this trend...the people who seem to be complaining the most about people researching medical stuff online seem to be the medial industry themselves.
    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.

    link to this | view in thread ]


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