Second opinions can really byte
By BLAST BY SETH BARNES
Becoming a medical professional used to be the highest calling a young man or woman could aspire towards. Only after years of toil in the elite echelons of academia could one even consider embarking upon this storied path. A rigorous medical school admissions process would then whittle the truly gifted from the merely brilliant and set them upon an arduous journey covering all facets and functions of medicine. And that was just the beginning. After school, the true training began in residency: Sleepless weeks turning into years, the sharpest minds of a generation learning all the physical complexities of the human body in a living, breathing laboratory. Only then could one be called “doctor.”
Alas, things have changed. Now, any old nobody can become a doctor in 0.40 seconds. That’s how long it takes a birdbrain like me to enter “weird skin rash” into Google and retrieve about 1.8 million results. And when you have information like that at your fingertips, it becomes a lot more difficult to justify hopping into the car just to run your medical condition by some over-credentialed “expert.”
I’m not saying this is a positive development. It certainly is not. It’s just a fact. With the advent of the search engine lifestyle, we’ve all become (in our own minds) legitimate medical sleuths.
And it’s making us 100 percent certifiably bonkers.
These days, the slightest nick, scratch or hiccup sends us running to the Internet. Is that funny cough after running on the treadmill symptomatic of something? What about that lumpy thing in my elbow? Could it be smallpox? We’ve all begun employing the Internet as a first responder for medical concerns big and small. I’ve even anecdotal-ly heard stories of people retrieving health advice from the World Wide Web in the midst of a heart attack or stroke. Picture telling any educated person 50 years ago this positively science-fictional scenario: In the future, when you have a splitting pain down your chest, you’re short of breath and your vision is blurry, instead of phoning the family physician or calling for a loved one, you actually will start typing out questions in front of a large, colorful electronic box — although there’s no word on whether the flying ambulance is on the verge of being invented.
Anyhow, I think you’re getting the gist of my argument that we’ve become a herd of drooling, uninformed medical dilettantes who are driving real medical professionals batty with the unsubstantiated malarkey we’re retrieving off the Internet. I myself have become wrapped up in waves of paranoia and premature grief over my own impending demise on several occasions. By the time you get to the doctor, you’ve already made funeral arrangements and said good-bye to friends and loved ones.
Ask any doctor out there and I’m sure they’ll tell you they’ve seen an increase in people showing up their office after a few hours bouncing around on WebMD utterly convinced that they’re suffering from “Avascular Necrosis of Bone,” “H Simiae Encephalomyelitis,” or “Xeroderma Pigmentosum.” Remember, these are people whose reading level doesn’t stretch much beyond a celebrity baby edition of People Magazine. But after a few hours on the Internet they’re dropping lingo that would send world-class surgeons scurrying for the archives of the New England Journal of Medicine. Makes sense, right?
If you put your mind to it, the reasons behind this Internet self-diagnosis epidemic become clear. The old adage that “if you have your health, you have everything” really is true. Ask anybody who’s been through a serious medical condition. That fact coupled with our nation’s unstable healthcare system make folks especially jittery these days. If that sore throat or bout of dizziness really is serious, will my health coverage take care of it? What if I don’t have healthcare? Ultimately we only have so much control over our well-being. It’s a game of chance inherent to everyday life. And when the world’s information is just a few keystrokes away, it’s natural to attempt to gain control over the sometimes uncertain enterprise of living.
But we should all try to get a grip. Just a little. We need to let the professionals do their job. That’s what they’ve been trained for. They also spent about half-a-million bucks getting their education, so it makes them feel good when they can put it to good use. Humor them.
And as for that “weird skin rash” I mentioned earlier, let’s just not talk about it. (Seth Barnes)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on June 22, 2006. Read the original PDF.