The hypocondriac effect is indeed an excellent point: surinformation is perhaps an anxiogen catalyst as it poses many more hurdles to our understanding. Again, I assume that people do ot get a good grasp on the medical problems that are confronted with (at least when discovering they have or just supposing it is not a well known chronic illness to which one is used to).

This browsing tool poses a problem of timing indeed. You rightfully lay the emphasis on the fact that someone could over estimate his illness by exagerrating his symptoms when first seeing his doctors just to play the wizz kid. In fact, the underlying problem is the nature of our relation with our usual doctor: is it a pure relation of trust, is there any intellectual rivalry (such as this guy has scores of diploma while I barely graduated from highschool etc etc)

Today, we still work in france under the rule of the coloc singulier, meaning that a patient cannot legally overule the diagnosis and the prescription of his doctor, but could still seek for second opinion. Doctors are making some commercial concessions (such as offering graciously certificates justifying days of medical leave). What would it be if the medical industry was totally patient (or I daresay customer) driven?

Interesting post! It raises the question of the utility of thi new generation of websites.

Like many colleagues, I’m very sceptic about the efficiency and the utility of such pseudo-medical web tools. We actually think that theses tools can sometimes be a problem.

1. As you mention at the beginning of the post, there are many barriers preventing an efficient self health (not necessarily the psychological ones: like the knowledge and the experience of the MD). You do not mention one very important barrier which is the ‘hypochondriac effect’. I will try to find a paper I read a couple of years ago about the psychological consequences of medical TV programs. After watching such programs, a significant proportion of people think they have some symptoms described in the program or start to feel the effect of some symptoms. Of course, we have to consider a bias. People interesting in this kind of programs are more receptive than the other part of population who will probably be less sensitive to this effect. I’m afraid that some people feel sicker or feel new symptoms after visiting this kind of website. This could have dramatic consequences for the diagnosis by the MD. Just to remind that the diagnosis begins with questions in order to understand what could be the disease that people are suffering. Thus, if people start exaggerating some of the symptoms, the diagnosis could be become difficult.

2. A (short) story that happened to me last year. A patient came to me to speak about his disease. He told me that he was diagnosed by a first MD with a very rare genetic disease. But he had a look on internet, and he was sure that the MD was wrong and did not diagnose the right disease. He was sure to have another one (according to the forum and websites he consulted). After a couple of questions, it was clear that the first MD was right. Moreover, he performed a genetic test to confirm the diagnosis. The patient had difficulties to believe it, and finished the interview with: “are you sure of the diagnosis? I was sure to have this disease”.

To finish, I would just like to discuss about one of the barrier: “the lazyness we express when trying to understand what’s going on”. I really think it is a problem of knowledge not really a problem of laziness.