Dr.s Do It Too!

[kwarendorf]

We're not the only ones who visit Dr. Google. According to this study more than 50% of doctors say they have looke up a condition in Wikipedia...

As to us, we're #2! MS is the second most frequently searched condition, with around 4 million searches last year.

Submitted FYI

Kyle

[karryon55]

Wow I bet this is a HUGE surprise to everyone......well the patients googling anyway. :-)

I actually saw a new young rheumatologist a couple of years ago & I was horrified that he googled all the time in front of me. I was surprised to see this but I think it could be more common than I thought. The younger generation of docs will probably not think twice because they have grown up around the www.

I am like JJ in MS was suggested to me many times but I scoffed it off thinking I couldn't have that. I was completely ignorant of what MS was. It took one of my docs to actually say "please just read some info from the MS society site & then come back & we can chat about it." I felt like a fool when my first MRI came back with "demyelinating disease" & I was asked to have the spine done as well.

I have tried googling some symptoms & immediately I had so many possible conditions come up, many were so far off it's scary.

I am surprised that MS is one of the most common conditions googled though. But when you look at it like ess suggested with the symptoms being so vast I'm guessing this inevitably took the googler to MS. Unfortunately there are a lot of people with health anxiety in this world today & Dr Google is only making it harder for those susceptible people.

Karry.

[supermum_ms]

I'm not surprised Dr's also google but i'm very surprised that Dr's are going to wikipedia of all places lol Patients googling their dx conditions as well as googling their sx's before seeing a Dr, would seem to me to be pretty normal behaviour for people living in the modern world.

I did read some thing once, that said MS was one of the most common neurological condition people with mental health issues feared, and on similar lines was that people with anxiety related mental health conditions, were more likely to disbelieve their Dr and medical tests and seek out support via social media outlets. I suspect that may have more to do with Dr Google helping to feed their anxiety and fear cycle, hyper focusing on anything that supports their fear is part of it, and Dr Google readily provides a quick and economical service no matter the medical condition.

I think ess is spot on, googling symptoms will often bring up MS, when the reality is that their sx's are 'more likely' caused by something else. I was personally googling the 'medical conditions' my dr at the time was dx-ing, and i'm absolutely sure i never paid any attention to anything else except the sites providing information on the particular condition provided by my Dr.

I honestly had no reason to google MS, until after another Dr questioned why i'd never been tested for MS when my sx's were consistent lol what i accurately knew of MS fit on a postage stamp, the rest was myth and total ignorance. I actually thought MS was more a male disease and more rare in women, and sheesh i was an athlete so no way was MS even remotely possible.

I was so ignorant of MS in general and I wouldn't of been able to name any sx's at all, so I was originally googling MS just trying to understand how she'd come up with MS in the first place, because i had no clue how an athletic women now in her 40's could possibly have had MS for over a decade and no one had ever thought of it before, so it had to be wrong! Though MS did connect the dots, shocked the heck out of me to read that the idiopathic medical conditions and recurring sx's i'd already been experiencing over the years, were commonly found in MS, so MS wasn't such a daft idea after all.

I suppose t doesn't really surprise me that MS is commonly googled, what i'd find more interesting is what people more commonly do with or about the information they google.

Cheers...........JJ  

    


      

[kwarendorf]

immisceo - I do not have any further information. The link was provided for entertainment purposes :-)

Ess - I suspect you're right. Given the breadth and depth of the MS symptom pool you're bound to find MS on most lists.

It's how I found MS. Every time I looked up a symptom, there was MS. I found many other causes listed for individual symptoms, but MS was the great connector of dots.

Kyle

[essdipity]

I'm guessing, but I think it's a pretty solid guess, that the reason MS is searched on so much is that some sites list 7 gazillion possible MS symptoms. And googling on practically any symptom is likely to return results that include MS. So then people keep googling MS.

Since MS is not anywhere near the 2nd most common disease out there, it seems fair to conclude that only an amazingly tiny fraction of people who initially google MS will turn out to have it. A relative few will perseverate on this anyway (over the years we've seen a good bit of this here) and despite really good evidence to the contrary, will brush aside all objections and insist that MS is what's wrong regardless.

[kwarendorf]

"Everything said I would be dead with in two years of diagnosis. That just ain't happening."

And we are glad of it :-)

[yousyous8]

I seriously believe that I must have googled MS at least a hundred thousand time! :/ I can tell you what every website says...

[immisceo]

I would like to think that they can search with a different level of discernment that your average punter, however. I think it's more likely that wikipedia is a portal *to* information rather than the final source in and of itself. I know I certainly trace back the sources and mentally jettison articles that aren't properly cited.

This looks like this may be the source of the factoid. http://www.imshealth.com/portal/site/imshealth/menuitem.c76283e8bf81e98f53c753c71ad8c22a/?vgnextoid=ebc072cc270b3410VgnVCM10000076192ca2RCRD You have to make a request to actually see the study methodology. Not a good sign, in my book. I didn't see the MS as #2 extract, but from the press release, it looked like patient and medical searches were lumped in together.

Do you have a link with more information, Kyle?

According to their own (IMS's) wikipedia article, they're the "largest vendor of U.S. physician prescribing data." (well cited)

[HVAC]

Wow that is amazing about MS. I looked up 100's of Neurological conditions and the MS mimics and only MS fit so I kept going to Neurologists until I was diagnosed.

I have learned that information which is five years old can be out dated. Also people are not statistics. When I looked up my Cancer I almost did not treat it all because the reports were so bleak. Everything said I would be dead with in two years of diagnosis. That just ain't happening.

The internet helped me understand MS.

Alex