Well, I didn’t diagnose myself, but…
A co-worker one time told me that he wasn’t getting much sleep because his baby kept coughing all the time. All night long.
After a while, I figured the baby had croup and recommended they run the shower and sit with the baby in the humidity.
I know it’s not a medically accepted treatment, but he came back to me a few days later and told me the baby got over it and started sleeping.
It’s just something I picked up from my grandmother somewhere. House knowledge can sometimes be better than book smarts.
Although, now that I’ve got book smarts, I’m more dangerous knowing what I know than not knowing what I *should *know.
This may be another reason why this is so much less annoying for me than it is for a lot of docs–I’m an internist, which means my practice is all adults. People tend to be a lot more reasonable about themselves than they are about their kids.
There’s also the pervasive idea in our culture that parental experience trumps actual knowledge and expertise–“you may have spent most of your life studying the human body and disease, but I know my child.” I’m sure that this plus the internet has led to many headdesk moments among my pediatric colleagues.
IANAD, but when I get a sports related injury I generally research injuries that are typical for participants of that particular sport and often it’s on target with the actual diagnosis. But that’s because it’s pretty much a no-brainer. Eg/ I played tennis too vigorously and got… ::dun-dun-duuuuuuun:: …tennis elbow!
For the more complicated injuries, I still found it helpful to have basic knowledge of the afflicted area and a number of common injury types. Like when I hurt my rotator cuff, by the time I went to the doctor, I was able to understand and ask relevant questions about what he was saying about my diagnosis and course of treatment.
Re surgeons: my fiance says they are great technicians, so to speak, but seem to lack the well-roundedness of the better GPs, internists and such. He said the vibe he got from his cardiac surgeon vs. the cardiologist was like night and day, but of course they’ve got different tasks to do.
I’m afraid the webz has influenced me re medical care - in that I feel more knowledgable, empowered (I hate that word) etc. Usually I make a conscious effort to keep my mouth shut and just watch the interesting things going on, but I will speak up if they ever try to put me on a certain class of drugs (won’t get into it here, but they are way overprescribed and I don’t believe they are beneficial). Much of the info about the drugs I have learned from doctor’s and other reliable blogs and published studies.
I had an employee literally taken away in an ambulance earlier this week because her coworker convinced her she was in respiratory distress from her birth control while reading Web MD. It has now been banned from my office. (She was diagnosed with an anxiety attack)
Like others have said, it’s only a problem when the person has gotten ahold of truly bad information and refuses to listen to any reasoned discussion. I had an argument about raw dog diets with this on guy for the better part of an hour. He was convinced that commercial kibble was made from euthanized cats and dogs and other insanity.
It is amazingly hard to have a serious discussion with someone on nutrition who not only got their degree from Google but is also missing teeth.
My doctor has a cartoon on her wall that says, “Please take this before googling any of your symptoms.” When I google my symptoms, I just scare myself, so I try not to.
My mother diagnosed (correctly) my aunt’s panic attacks. My aunt would suddenly be unable to breathe, pass out, they’d take her to the ER and give her oxygen, and send her on her way again. My mother suggested to her doctor that there might actually be a reason this is happening, my aunt got a prescription, and hasn’t had any trouble since.
I always thought my mother should have been a doctor.
Sure. Two weeks ago I went to the doctor’s and said I thought I had a bladder infection (for the first time). I was right. I’ve correctly deduced I’ve had ear and sinus infections too, but these can’t be hard to figure out given they’re all so common and there’s tons of knowledge about the symptoms out there.
DoctorJ- paediatric practice would be wonderful if you didn’t have to deal with the parents!
Parents who Google in order to research why their child has had 3 colds in 4 months and has swollen lymph glands in their neck will inevitably find links to sites about lymphoma and leukaemia, and will be super anxious.
You tell them that the average pre-school child has 12-15 viral upper respiratory tract infections a year, which often causes reactive lymph node swelling.
If you then say you don’t think that their (well looking, apyrexic, happy) child requires scans and biopsies you may appear to be lazy, complacent or incompetent, when in fact you are using your clinical knowledge and experience to make a judgement.
The odds are much higher that a child who appears well is much more likely to have reactive lymphadenopathy than a haematological malignancy. It is safer and kinder to sit and wait for a couple of weeks either for the child to become unwell or for the lymphadenopathy to resolve rather than to subject them to unpleasant and possibly harmful testing.
But you try explaining that to a parent who has worked themselves into a state of panic after reading blogs that start “Our brave son’s battle with lymphoma began with a string of colds and an innocent seeming lump on his neck which our family doctor dismissed as a simple reaction to infection”.
This thread seems to focus on simply diagnostics (as the title says), but has anyone correctly chosen a path of treatment/medications etc that they were correct (or woefully wrong) about?
I developed acne 2ish years ago as a side affect from Depo-Provera, or “the shot”. I was 100% certain I did not need to change the Depo. I was 100% wrong. My dermo persuaded me to switch to Yasmin, which really helped. She also told me to put Retin-A under my eyes for my dark circles, which I was 100% certain wouldn’t work and I was 100% wrong about again.
What I was right about was my terrible reaction to any and all retinoids, including Differin - none of them worked, but in my dermo’s defense, I was getting the acne and oiliness from my dad and psorasis-y genes from my mom, an incredibly rare and bizarre combination. I also did my own research and found sulfur lotion helps with the formation of blackheads, especially on people who have tried and had no success with retinoids. A month in, the sulfur lotion has been exceptional. On the whole, my dermo PA seems much more excited to give me new and expensive treatments, when the sulfur lotion was a super old generic at $15 for a gigantic bottle. Same thing with my vitiligo - even though 80% of it is on my hands and feet, people bombard me with pricey treatments rather than the tried and true steroid creams.
To be fair, my ortho dude and my ENT guy are both very laid-back, friendly types. I haven’t met any general or plastic surgeons, though. Maybe too much soft tissue surgery makes you an ass.
When I messed up my ankle a year and a half ago, I googled ankle anatomy just because I was curious about what could possibly have torn that let things move around in such a weird way (my peroneal tendons were luxating up over the lateral malleolus every few strides when I walked, then snapping back in to place). I did not so much scare myself with the prospect of surgery as think, “huh, yeah, I guess it really does need to be checked out”. The ortho guy almost didn’t find it and was going to just send me to physical therapy, since just manipulating the ankle didn’t make them pop out, but I had figured out that when I pressed on the tendons a certain way they would do their thing, and it certainly got his attention. (Hey, party trick!)
OTOH, Lyme disease has become the self diagnosis of choice among horse owners. A wide variety of nebulous symptoms (including owner hypochondria) have been ascribed to Lyme at one time or another, and if you go on horse message boards there is always at least one person who says “it might be Lyme!” on every thread about a horse that isn’t acting right, has a vague lameness, or has neurological problems. It does not help that Lyme has not been well characterized in horses, since the only study of experimental infection did not produce any outward signs of disease, horses on the East Coast are being exposed and infected all the time, making positive blood tests unreliable, and doxycycline (the usual treatment) decreases joint inflammation. Vets in endemic regions report sending out blood on horses with vague lamenesses, putting the horse on doxy, and finding out on bloodwork that the horse didn’t have Lyme, but the doxy made the horse sound anyway! I was with a vet one time doing a follow-up on a horse who had been showing moderate to severe neurological signs, been tested and treated for a common protozoal cause of neuro signs, and had started improving. Despite the evidence pointing towards a protozoal cause, the owner insisted on testing the horse for Lyme and treating with doxycycline when the horse inevitably came back positive for exposure and infection (since it’s all over the freaking place on the East Coast).
To follow up on my own thing here, the thing I was worried about was a randomly occuring, sharp pain in one of my cheekbones. Going by teh intertubes, I had almost convinced myself I had trigeminal neuralgia, aka “the suicide disease.” I had sense enough to go to an ENT first and let him check me out thoroughly, and he was pretty sure it was just an odd byproduct of inflamed sinuses caused in turn by allergies. He prescribed some allergy meds and sure enough, I haven’t had the pain since.
