Just about everyone has combed the Internet, hoping to match their symptoms with a disease. Most of the time, though, Dr. Google lets us down. Would-be patients get stressed-out, reach bad diagnoses and, ultimately, require a physician’s point of view.
Kevin Everett had the opposite experience. He used the Internet to diagnose his cancer after doctors wrote him off as suffering from ailments such as bronchitis, asthma and sleep apnea.
According to the Daily Mail, Everett, 60 years old and a UK-based father of four, diagnosed his nasopharyngeal cancer — located where the nose and throat converge — by snooping around on Britain’s National Health Services Web site. “I have no faith in GPs anymore,” he told the Mail. “I just wonder if they’d picked it up earlier, would I be going through all this now?”
Everett is preparing to undergo radiation therapy and is appalled at being told, “If it had taken any longer to diagnose, it could have spread further and would have been incurable.”
While Google hopes to make it easier for ailing ’Net surfers to treat themselves, the tech company recently updated its mobile app to streamline the process of finding illness info, flesh-and-blood doctors insist that this sort of thing is best left to the professionals.
Dr. Aditi Nerurkar, a primary care physician at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center has seen her share of patients who relied on the Internet for medical information. And she feels for them.
According to her conversation with Mashable, “While I love their sense of curiosity and ownership of their health, online searches can (and often do) go awry.” Virginia Kwan, a psychologist at Arizona State University, told Daily Beast , “The way gamblers say they have a hot hand, cyberchondriacs [hypochondriacs who fuel their medical paranoia with online searches] believe they have hot symptoms. If they hit the first two [maladies] in a list, they believe they must have the third one as well.”
Everett can see where the docs are coming from. “I know diagnosing yourself is not the best thing, and it must drive the doctors batty. But why couldn’t they, as trained [doctors], find out what was wrong with me?”