Dubai

If you discover worrying symptoms and just can’t understand what they mean, what should you do?

According to Dr Hasrat Parkar, consultant in Family Medicine and Division Chief of Ambulatory Medicine at Tawam Hospital, your family doctor should be the first person to turn to.

“This is a very difficult issue to address because, obviously, our first advice is to consult a medical practitioner. Your family doctor will be able to direct you to the right specialist, because what appears to be a heart problem could be a gastrointestinal issue,” Dr Parkar said.

However, the culture of having a family doctor is not common in the UAE as well as many other countries, making matters worse. In such a case, they could consult a general internist at a hospital.

“General internists, like family doctors, deal with undifferentiated illnesses. They normally deal with heart or lung problems, which are medical, not surgical,” he added.

The internet can also add fuel to fire, by throwing up several results for your symptoms.

“Which of these results are actually based on sound medical principles of evaluating your symptoms and giving you relevant advice? That is the biggest question,” Dr Parkar said.

Around one per cent of all Google searches are for checking symptoms and the company has worked with doctors to develop a new feature for its Search app that will display a summary of related conditions when you search for symptoms online.

A 2015 study by Harvard Medical School in the US found that online symptom checkers do not always list the actual medical problem correctly. More importantly, websites are unable to advise the person on how quickly he or she should contact a medical professional.

Delay in getting medical attention can turn costly for cases of stroke, for example.

Dr Abhay Nigam, a specialist physician working in Ras Al Khaimah, said that in cases of a stroke, the patient should receive medical care within 90 minutes of the onset of symptoms.

“Most people have the attitude that it will get sorted and do not get to a doctor quickly enough. That is a disaster,” he said.