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We’ve all done it. Maybe you have a weird rash or a cough that just won’t go away, so you turn to Google to search for your symptoms.
Despite the cliché that research results will just tell you you have cancer, a major new study in the United States has shown that testing for your symptoms may not be as bad as doctors have it. thought.
Not only were the study participants slightly better than expected at arriving at an accurate diagnosis, searching for symptoms did not increase their anxiety levels either.
“I have patients all the time where the only reason they come to my office is they went google and the internet said they had cancer,” said lead author and doctor David Levine of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
But as any good scientist would tell you, anecdotes aren’t science, so he and his colleagues set out to investigate symptom research a little further.
They found 5,000 American participants through an online recruiting service and asked them to review and diagnose a simple case study, assess their anxiety over the diagnosis, and suggest a triage option (to let it heal by itself to go directly to the hospital).
“Next, participants were asked to use the internet to research case information and relay their updated diagnosis, triage and anxiety,” the team wrote in the document.
“This study design mimicked the way a person typically interacts with the Internet: encountering information, forming a preliminary conclusion, and then reforming a conclusion after searching the Internet.”
The team also recruited 21 primary care physicians at Harvard Medical School to verify that researchers understood the cases.
The average time that participants searched for information on the Internet was around 12 minutes, and some participants changed their diagnosis and triage level after the search.
As you can see below, however, they didn’t always get it right – the diagnostic accuracy before and after internet search was 49.8% and 54%, respectively.
Anchoring or reversal on the original diagnosis and triage (Levine et al., JAMA Network Open, 2020)
However, the vast majority of participants stuck to their guns even after searching the Internet – around 85% for triage and diagnosis. That left about 15% in one or the other of the categories that changed their minds.
“9.6% went from an incorrect diagnosis to a correct diagnosis, while 5.4% went from a correct diagnosis to an incorrect diagnosis,” the team writes.
Likewise, 12.8 percent of respondents reversed their triage decision after searching the Internet, with roughly similar percentages in either direction: 6.6 percent went from correct triage to triage incorrect, while 6.2 percent went from incorrect sorting to correct sorting. “
So while laymen are not expert diagnoses (with or without internet help), the resulting picture is certainly not as bad as the team assumed. In fact, participants’ anxiety about the outcome remained exactly the same after the Google search, and confidence in their own responses was also the same.
“Participants reported that in general it was a bit difficult to find useful information on the Internet and they trusted the information they found quite enough,” the team wrote.
“They noted that the most useful sources of information were search engines, followed by sites specializing in health. A small proportion of respondents found social networking sites the most useful.
There are a few limitations here – for example, participants were asked to pretend a loved one had the symptoms; their anxiety could have been higher if they were experiencing the symptoms themselves.
In addition, the results were based on a “correct” answer, and in medicine this is not always the case. The 21 primary care physicians mostly agreed with each other and with the researchers on the diagnosis, but not entirely.
“The doctors did not entirely agree with our choices. However, we selected several experienced doctors, and the accuracy rates among the doctors were over 90 percent for all thumbnails,” the team adds. .
So while this probably isn’t the last word on the matter, it might not be such a bad thing to google your symptoms for your symptoms – as long as you keep in mind that you could all go wrong. way.
The research was published in JAMA network open.
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