We’ve all done it. The cost of visiting a doctor for something as trivial as that throaty cough or that itchy patch of skin seems too high, so we turn to our good old friend, Google.
An internet search on our symptoms seems simpler, quicker and, most importantly, cheaper than waiting for an appointment with the local doctor.
But diagnosing ourselves online is more dangerous than we think. We just have to tap in ‘headache’, ‘tired all the time’ and Doctor Google has told us we have some rare type of fatal disease, with only days to live.
The first danger we can encounter is prescribing ourselves the wrong medication. Self-medicating can lead to one in ten women enduring unpleasant side effects as a result of misdiagnosis.
Dr Sean Cummins tells the Daily Mail he thinks people need to see their doctors more often.
“I’m a GP and pioneer of online medicine, I recently set up a provate online consulting service, you might think I’d be all for online diagnosis, but I think people need to see their doctors more often.”
Half of the women surveyed by the Daily Mail had diagnosed themselves online, then bought a treatment on the high street without checking with a pharmacist if it was the correct product. A fifth had at some time wrongly suspected they had a serious disease. Many women had wrongly diagnosed themselves as having thrush, high blood pressure or asthma.
The other danger is the complete opposite, the risk of under-diagnosing yourself through the search engine.
“It is the people who look up a symptom and decide it is something reasonably innocuous,” says Mr Cummins, “such as thrush, which is mentioned in the survey, buy a tube of Canestan and get on with life. Under-diagnosing is much more dangerous and it’s more of a worry than thinking there is something seriously wrong.
“I have a patient who did just that. She had some stomach pains and lost weight. Thrilled with her new slimness, she decided her stomach pains were the result of her diet, which was clearly working.
“When she started experiencing discomfort when urinating, and some itching, she did an internet search and decided it was cystitis. She self-medicated, drinking cranberry juice and over-the-counter preparations, for months before seeing me. In fact, she had cervical cancer, and it was advanced.
“I’m not saying you shouldn’t use Google, but you need to be wary about thinking you know better than the medical profession.”
The message is clear, a face-to-face meeting with our doctor is the safest option.
