Log onto the Internet and you can find medical advice on almost everything, from how to tell if you are having a heart attack to treating intestinal worms. Even though symptoms like headache, mild fever, and fatigue/dizziness can lead to a self-diagnosis of anything from a migraine to terminal brain cancer, a U of T researcher claims the Internet is improving the relationship between doctors and their patients.
Dr. Gunther Eysenbach, a senior scientist at the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation and associate professor at U of T, estimates over 70 million people in the United States and one million in Canada have used the Internet to obtain health-related information. He found patients are using the Internet to keep themselves informed, and often do research before visiting their doctors.
The traditional doctor-patient relationship, where the doctor knew everything and the patient knew little, is changing. Today, the physician is not the only, or even the primary, source of health information for the consumer. Physicians have seen a dramatic change in the understanding and knowledge their patients have of medicine and medical conditions.
While some doctors find this change heartening, since patients understand more about their treatment and are equipped to ask better questions, others are concerned by patients using the Internet for health education. Some doctors fear their positions of authority will be compromised if patients have the same access to information as they do. Others worry about misinformation that patients can find. This can result in irrelevant questions that can take up valuable time or requesting procedures and tests that are not applicable to the patient’s condition.
Despite the headaches for doctors, though, the real challenge in using the Internet for medical information is for the consumer. They must sift everything available on the Web and detect biased information or fraudulent data. But just the sheer volume of data available can cause severe problems for certain individuals, especially those prove to neuroses.
Hypochondria is a medical condition in which the patient is preoccupied with physical health. In order to be officially diagnosed as a hypochondriac however, a patient must believe for more than six months that they have “a serious illness despite and in spite of medical reassurance of the contrary.” And while the Internet can be a positive force in health and medical education, it can also feed the neuroses of hypochondriacs.
A quick search on the Internet yields thousands of hits for hypochondriacs, including links to books, diagnosis tests and general information. More disturbing, however, is a website created by hypochondriacs, for hypochondriacs. Touted as a “resource for hypochondriacs,” the site outlines where to go to find out about new diseases and “creepy crawlies.” The list includes websites for the Centre for Disease Control and the Pubmed search engine at the National Library of Medicine, often used by researchers and physicians to research new scientific developments.
The use of the Internet in medicine had opened up doors to patients to learn more about their conditions, and could potentially assist doctors as they strive to help maintain the health of their patients. However, like anything on the Internet, the information must be viewed with caution and care taken that the current explosion of healthcare information doesn’t do more harm to patient health than good.
