The wonderful Dr. Curtis Cripe has been my physician for a number of years now and during that time we have seen the rise of the internet, which was very much in its infancy when I started going to see Dr Cripe. As many of you may know, the internet is a place where you can find just about any information which you want, including medical advice. That’s right, how many of you have gone straight to the search engine when you don’t know what’s wrong with you? As you input your symptoms and find a wealth of responses which you can use to diagnose yourself, job done. Dr. Cripe however has always told me to avoid this and whilst it is difficult, he makes a great deal fo sense when he tells me why I shouldn’t use ‘Dr Google’.
Making It Worse
Many people don’t just use the internet to find out what may be wrong with them, they also use the internet to find out what treatment they should be looking for. This is the type of information which will make a doctor wince, as patients can simply assume the internet to be right and then go and buy some pills to cure what they think they may have. In actual fact doing this could very easily make the real problem worse, which is why it is something that should be avoided.
Doctor Doctor
Let’s say that you notice a strange rash and you have a headache, on a Monday morning, you call the surgery and you make an appointment for Wednesday morning. Deciding that you don’t wish to wait, you hit the search engine to find out what is going on, and naturally you assume the worst. What will now happen, is absolutely nothing that wasn’t happening before, only now you start to panic, and you will be panicking for the next 48 hours. The point here is that you will be going to see the doctor anyway, which is why there if absolutely no point in worrying yourself more than you have to.
Always The Worst
Nobody, in the history of the internet has gone on to check their symptoms and left thinking ‘it must be nothing’. What actually happens is that we always assume the worst case scenario, because that’s just what the human mind will do. You could have a rash and a headache which could mean an allergy or a brain tumor, and we already know that everyone will convince them that the latter is more accurate. If you try hard enough then you can make any symptom, even the most mild, into a life-threatening illness and invariably that is just what we do when we go online to check out our symptoms.
The information online is just facts which can be interpreted in a wide number of ways, if you really want to find out what is wrong with you, make an appointment and speak with your doctor.