Online information can be helpful when looking for research. From simple home remedies to alternative medication many people opt for self-help when it comes to health problems.
Gulf News readers, too, seem to prefer going online when faced with difficult health-related concerns.
Dubai resident, Nouman Mughal, said that blogs and testimonials are extremely helpful for him to find out more about any health problem that he may be worried about.
“I go to three or four different websites or blogs. Then I would look at the best option available to me, because I would prefer a home remedy instead of going to a hospital. The second step, if I don’t have a home remedy, is to find out if there is a pharmacy nearby from where I can get the necessary medicine. The third option is to approach a doctor,” he told Gulf News.
Once he has a successful home remedy experience, he feels obliged to share it with the online community.
“It has helped me a lot. I have stopped going to the doctors for petty issues,” he said.
However, what happens when people go online for symptoms that do not necessarily have just one potential diagnosis?
Studies show that the mix of anxiety about one’s health and endless information online can be a dangerous one.
A study that was published in 2013 in the Chicago-based Journal of Consumer Research suggested that people tend to overestimate their own risk for serious ailments, in a way that they wouldn’t do if they were thinking about someone else’s symptoms.
“This is particularly true when the disease is rare,” Dengfeng Yan, the co-author of the study told HealthDay, a health-based news website.
Another study conducted in 2008 by Microsoft called “Cyberchondria: Studies of the Escalation of Medical Concerns in Web Search” claimed that the internet had the potential to fuel anxieties in people, handing over large volumes of information to those who have little or no medical training to process that information.
What makes the situation worse is the availability of online services like ‘symptom checkers’ where users can enter the symptoms they have observed to find a diagnosis. and you have a dangerous mix at hand. A 2015 study by Harvard Medical School found that online symptom checkers misdiagnose patients with disturbing frequency.
“These tools may be useful in patients who are trying to decide whether they should get to a doctor quickly, but in many cases, users should be cautious and not take the information they receive from online symptom checkers as gospel,” Ateev Mehrotra, one of the authors of the study told Harvard Gazette.
Dubai-based family medicine practitioner Dr Shabari Patkar has seen first-hand the result of web-fuelled hypochondria, having faced patients armed with detailed printouts of diseases they believed they were suffering from. However, she does acknowledge the reason why most patients prefer to do an online search before coming in for an appointment.
“Firstly, you have to make time to come and see the doctor and then you have some 15-20 minutes with the doctor, so you want to get the most for your buck, so to speak. So, patients try to read up in advance,” she told Gulf News.
“As long as people are not coming with preconceived ideas of what they may or may not have, there is nothing wrong with being informed or educated,” she said.
However, she urged patients to not go for a self-diagnosis as it would reduce the therapeutic value of actually coming in to see a doctor apart from making a patient overly anxious.
“I had a patient come in with headache and if you look it up online, a head can take you through the scariest of diagnoses. What people are most concerned about is brain tumour or haemorrhage but it could be as simple as an eye strain or caffeine withdrawal. But they come in with their mind made,” she said.
From demanding particular tests to pushing for a specific diagnosis, if patients convince themseleves of a self-diagnosis they can make a doctor’s job a lot harder than it already is.
“They are not looking for an opinion, they are just looking for a signature – and that can be really harmful for them. It takes quite a while to reassure them,” she added.
So, the next time you go visit a doctor, feel free to do your background research. Just don’t become the doctor.
— The writer is a freelance journalist with Gulf News
