When a mother visits a doctor to diagnose her child’s illness, she often relies on information from the internet to ask the doctor a series of questions. However, questioning a diagnosis based on fragmented information can actually make it harder to get care. We emphasize that discerning accurate information and trusting the experience of professionals is the beginning of the right approach to healthcare.
The cool mom gives her opinion. Before I can finish reading that she’s sending her child in for a fever, she asks me what’s wrong. After a mock-guessing look, the doctor starts by controlling her breathing. The child had been running a high fever for over a week and looked exhausted, with chapped lips and red, puffy eyes. There was a red rash on his neck, with palpable bruising. The doctor considered several possibilities and said he suspected Kawasaki disease, but the mother immediately gave him a skeptical look, saying, “Kawasaki? My child is different, are you sure it’s that?” The doctor explained that symptoms can vary from patient to patient and that complications are possible, even if they are atypical. But the mother was not satisfied with the answer, so she asked if there were any other treatment options, and pulled out her smartphone to research what happens if it goes untreated and who are the best doctors in the field.
I remembered a TIME article from a few years ago, “What If Your Patient Were a Googler? It talked about a new challenge doctors were facing when some patients started coming into the office with Google searches on their phones. Increasingly, patients are coming to doctors with their own solutions or making unwanted demands based on partial information. In the case of rare diseases, it’s possible that the patient knows more than the doctor, but in most cases, this information is fragmentary and not enough to lead to a proper diagnosis or treatment.
This situation is not unique to the United States. According to one study, 80% of U.S. internet users look up their health information online, and 63% of them say it influences how they manage their illness. However, only 25% of them check the source or date of publication, and most of them don’t consider the quality of the information. In Korea, a similar situation is becoming increasingly prevalent, with more and more patients using online information to predict their illness before visiting a doctor.
Information on the Internet can do both good and bad. When it’s right, it can facilitate patient-doctor communication and reduce unnecessary explanations. But when it’s misleading, it can take a long time to correct, and it can also be very difficult to overcome patient distrust. To explain this, the theory of Daniel Kahneman, professor emeritus at Princeton University, is often cited. He explained that the human brain coexists with two modes of thinking: fast thinking and slow thinking. Fast thinking is emotional, intuitive, and immediate, while slow thinking is the slow, logical way of thinking and controlling behavior. In general, humans tend to favor fast thinking, which makes it easier to believe and accept the first information we encounter on the internet or in the media. This tendency, coupled with our tendency to value first experiences, results in a lack of willingness to correct information, even if it is incorrect.
So how can patients use the internet to get the right information? Not all internet information is unreliable. Official sites run by government agencies, authoritative news organizations, and university hospitals are relatively reliable. These sites can provide basic information about the severity of your symptoms, which specialty you should see, and can be used as additional resources after your doctor’s appointment. It’s especially helpful to check these sites for information on how to manage chronic conditions and how to prevent diseases that run in your family.
Counseling on stress management, smoking cessation, alcohol cessation, and other health hazards is also easily accessible online. It’s also a great way to get advice on alternative medicine if you’re abroad and language barriers prevent you from getting the medical care you need. With the proliferation of smartphones, health information is also increasingly available through social networking services (SNS). Recently, several university hospitals have been using their Twitter accounts to provide health lectures, brief medical information, and real-time health consultations, and there have been reports of rapid response to emergencies through these social media activities.
Thanks to the internet, patients now have access to medical information at their fingertips. More and more people are researching their symptoms before they go to the doctor, or reading up on health tips and prevention. But it’s important to note that that’s not all. Much of the information on the internet is not always accurate or reliable, and it doesn’t necessarily correspond to your current condition. It’s important to be aware of your sources, and to be able to sift through and accept information that is credible. Above all, you need to trust the experience and knowledge of the doctor who is sitting in front of you and examining you. The last thing you want to do is to doubt your doctor based on flimsy information, which could lead to a situation where you’re not getting the care and recovery you need.
