Dr. Google

By Meghan Eze.

Google. It’s our answer to everything nowadays. Out of toilet paper? Order it online. Want to know how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop™? Spoiler alert, it’s 364 and do you want to know how I figured that out? I Googled it. Need to get directions to that job interview tomorrow? Google Maps can get you anywhere you need to go (within reason of course). In this age of technology when you can search the Internet for the answers to anything you could ever possibly want to know, why would anyone ever leave their house? Unfortunately for a large portion of the population, the internet has become a convenient replacement to healthcare as well.

WebMD™ is a hypochondriac’s best friend. Despite having actual educational content on their website, WebMD is most well known for its ability to magically diagnose you with stage four colon cancer from a few stomach cramps and a sore pelvis. WebMD, however, is not the only culprit of this cycle of misinformation: the Mayo Clinic, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the U.K.’s National Health Service all have online system checkers that are supposed to diagnose your condition from the comfort of your own couch binging the newest season of your favorite show.

Using an online symptom checker is extremely tempting — who wouldn’t want to have a doctor’s appointment in their own home? In today’s fast-paced society where everything can be ordered through an app and search engine queries can produce answers in milliseconds, why then, would we have any desire to venture out of our pink Snuggies and slink our way to the actual doctor’s office? The answer: we wouldn’t. Everything about online symptom checkers seems like the better alternative, but would you task a computer with buying your groceries for you or babysitting your children? Probably not. So why then, do we trust our own health to a computer? In a 2015 study on the accuracy of a correct diagnosis of 45 cases, there was only a 34% success rate with WebMD compared to a 72.1% success rate for actual physicians; meanwhile, Elon Musk recently reported that there is a 70% chance that he will travel to Mars. With odds like these, it’s a wonder that anyone still trusts these online programs.

The problem here lies with the structure of our healthcare system. Doctors only spend about five to ten minutes with the average patient in their offices, but the average wait time in a doctor’s office is eighteen minutes. Although oftentimes inaccurate, 84% patients say that wait time is important to their experience at the doctor and would rather turn to an instantaneous symptom checker than wait in a doctor’s office. If we are to ever truly address the prevalence of online symptom checkers we first have to reevaluate the structure of the current state of the healthcare system. Symptom checkers were originally created to promote more informed dialogs with physicians during consultations, but somewhere along the way, they began to take over. Symptom checkers are great tools and have definitely made healthcare more accessible since their creation, but the next time that WebMD misdiagnoses your pulled muscle for osteoporosis, maybe try getting a second opinion.