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.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
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.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
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.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]