The Internet as a diagnostic aid: the patients' perspective

Abstract

A questionnaire-based cross-sectional study was conducted in order to determine how frequently patients attending a genitourinary (GU) medicine clinic use the Internet to diagnose their own symptoms, and to assess the accuracy of their diagnosis. Out of 223 symptomatic patients attending a GU clinic, 101 (45.3%) looked up their symptoms on the Internet. The age difference between those who looked up their symptoms and those who did not was not statistically significant (P = 0.77). Twenty (19.8%) out of 101 patients diagnosed their own symptoms, and 14 (13.9%) patients made the correct diagnosis. Ninety-one (90.1%) patients used the Google((R)) search engine as the starting point for their search. Although the Internet plays an important role in providing health information, the variable quality of health information available limits its use as a diagnostic tool by patients.

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“…The parents of the presented cases did not have a medical background and were of average education. Apart from the recognition of symptoms leading to diagnosis of a disorder, as illustrated here and elsewhere,10–12 frequent searches on the internet may also lead to anxiety and medical overconsumption, also known as cyberchondria 2 13 14…”

“…The presented cases show that this may result in a final diagnosis. It has been previously reported that the search engine ‘Google’ can be a useful diagnostic tool for both physicians9 10 and non-physicians,11 12 especially in difficult diagnostic cases. Tang and Ng selected 26 complex cases presented in the New England Journal of Medicine : in 58% of the cases, ‘Google’ revealed the correct diagnosis 10.…”

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“…Culture methods are often unreliable and fail to detect the established pathogen even when its presence is confirmed with molecular methods [34,102]. Due to the universal nature of clinical disease signs, medical professionals caution patients against self-diagnosis with symptom checker websites [103]. Likewise, accurate diagnosis of coral disease aetiology requires well-informed analyses of not only gross disease signs and host coral affected, but long-term monitoring of affected host populations that includes assessment of environmental parameters including temperature [104] and water quality [105].…”

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“…Some patients are successful in finding the correct diagnosis through the Internet, in some cases identifying rare diseases that their physicians had not yet considered [4]. In fact, a study examining a sample of the clinicopathological case conferences that focused on diagnosis rather than management from the 2005 volume of the New England Journal of Medicine found that Google searches with a select three to five key terms correctly diagnosed 15 of the 26 cases [15]. On the other hand, a study of 101 patients attending a genitourinary medicine clinic in the UK who researched their symptoms online found that only 14 made the correct diagnosis [14].…”