Searching the internet for symptoms of illness can help a patient to make a marginally more accurate diagnosis, a new study has suggested.
While doctors generally advise against combing Google for explanations for their ailments to avoid potentially unnecessary concern and researching inaccurate information, teams from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School Department of Health Care Policy claim that self-research may not be as harmful as feared.
“I have patients all the time, where the only reason they come into my office is because they Googled something and the Internet said they have cancer,” said author Dr David Levine, of the Division of General Internal Medicine and Primary Care at the Brigham.
“I wondered, ‘Is this all patients? How much cyberchondria is the Internet creating?’”
The study, published in journal JAMA Network Open, asked 5,000 participants to read short descriptions of symptoms of illnesses including viruses, heart attacks and strokes and to imagine that a loved one was experiencing them.
The participants were asked to provide a diagnosis, plan of action (e.g. leave it to improve on its own or to call emergency services) and their own anxiety levels based on the information alone, then to look up the symptoms online and to offer another conclusion.
While they made slightly more accurate diagnoses after performing an internet search, no difference in their abilities to triage illnesses or change in their anxiety levels was observed.
“Our work suggests that it is likely to be okay to tell our patients to ‘Google it,’” Dr Levine said. “This starts to form the evidence base that there’s not a lot of harm in that, and, in fact, there may be some good.”
While the authors recognise the limitations of asking participants to imagine someone close to them was experiencing the symptoms instead of themselves and that the study is not representative of all people that use the Internet for health-related searches, Mr Levine hopes to expand a future study to examine the ability of AI to use the internet to correctly diagnose patients.
