He llo.
Welcome to the Own Your Health Podcast.
I'm Cyndi Lynne, and I can't wait to
help you step into your health power.
Tonight, I'm going to talk to you about something
that I've been hearing so much about lately.
Doctor Google.
I know Doctor Google is the bane of existence
for many physicians who are practicing out there.
And if you aren't familiar with the term, Doctor Google is
kind of what you get when you have people who are
experiencing symptoms or have questions or are feeling something in their
body and they go online and they look it up and
they may use Google or some other browser, but you'll often
hear doctors complain that the patient comes in after seeing Doctor
Google and tries to tell them, tries to tell the doctor
what's wrong with them.
And so I get questions from the clients that
I see in my office and they'll say, well,
all right, I went online and I googled and
I'll say, great, what did you find out?
And it's interesting because one of two things happens.
One is people go down a rabbit hole of
something that's obscure, very rare in terms of a
diagnosis for their symptoms, or people go immediately to
a very bad diagnosis, a very serious illness.
And this happens for a couple of reasons.
And one is the algorithms, the algorithms that
are embedded and operate within the Internet.
So when you go into Google and you enter
symptoms, you say, I have a headache and insomnia
and indigestion, and you enter those symptoms, okay, a
number of things are going to happen.
One, the first 5-10 results that you get
back are going to be sponsored results, sponsored
by companies selling a product that would address
any one of those symptoms.
And they'll attach those symptoms to a
diagnosis for which they have a product.
So those are sponsored results that come up when you Google
or really when you use most any Internet search engine.
And obviously, these sites are trying to sell something, so
they'll latch on to whatever symptoms you put in.
They'll provide a diagnosis, the name of
the disease and their associated drugs or
treatments that can help that.
Now, does that mean that that's what you have?
No, absolutely not.
But it does cause people to worry sometimes, or it
does cause people to rush into their doctor and say,
oh, my gosh, I think I have XYZ diagnosis.
Okay.
And for physicians, this can be
very threatening is the right word.
Absolutely frustrating, because here's someone who has a lot
of education and has seen a lot of symptoms
in a lot of people, and you've gone to
them and they want to do the diagnosing okay,
so for fear of sounding like I'm defending physicians
in this, because that's not usually my stand,
if you listen to this podcast enough,
just know that that's the thought process.
That's what's going on when you
hear physicians malign doctor Google.
I'm not a huge fan of looking for
your diagnosis or trying to figure out what's
wrong with you using a search engine.
Like I said, because the algorithms
are so, so biased right now.
They're biased by sponsored posts and ads that come up.
And, you know, interestingly enough, your physician's
training is sponsored and paid for by
many of those same pharmaceutical companies.
They provide huge amounts of money
to medical education systems, universities and
medical programs and research programs.
So your physician's probably sponsored by a lot
of the same ads that Google brings up.
But the other piece is that coming to a
conclusion just based on a few symptoms, without other
observations, without other kinds of testing, is really premature.
It really is often just a
pathway to a pharmaceutical intervention.
So do I use Google?
Do I use search engines?
Absolutely.
And I do it in two different ways.
And maybe this will potentially help you and it
can help you in working on your own, it
can help you working with your physician.
It can make you, excuse me, more effective when
you go in and you talk to your physician
about particular symptoms that you might be having.
So the two ways that I use search
engines when I'm investigating a particular illness is
by putting in the illness itself.
Now, if you don't know what
you have, you can't do this.
If you're worried that you have a particular diagnosis, a
particular diet disease, you can certainly look to that disease
and you'll get a much more objective list of these
are potentially some of the symptoms or some of the
observations you would have with this disease.
So the data tends to be a little bit
less biased and a little bit more factual, just
based on definition of what a particular disease involves.
And this kind of googling, this kind of research can
be helpful if you or somebody you love has been
diagnosed and you're trying to get more information.
You can look at a wide variety of sources,
you can look at different clinic sources, you can
look at different sponsored sources, you can take a
good look at a variety of sources that come
from a variety of different directions and gather some
information about a particular disease.
Now, I can't promise you that this won't be biased
and it won't be funded, but your information going from
disease to symptoms will be a little bit more clear
and objective than if you just put in symptoms looking
for what is the potential disease.
The second way that I use Google and would invite you
to do searching in the same way is that rather than
looking for answers, I use it to ask better questions.
So if you, for example, were to search
headaches or types of headaches, you may get
a variety of descriptions that would then help
you better describe to your physician.
For example, what kind of headache are you having?
Are you having a headache,
and again we'll just use this as an example
because it's a you know, a fairly common one,
and headaches can mean so many different things.
If you want to search, if you want to
look how headaches are described, it may give you
better language to describe to your doctor or your
practitioner when you go in to see them.
For example, you could have a headache with a
lot of pressure in the front of your face,
and that could be sinus related headache.
You could have headache low in the back of your neck.
You could have light sensitivity,
you could have sound sensitivity.
You could have headaches with
nausea involved with them.
You could have headaches with visual disturbances, seeing
colors or seeing, or having your vision become
unclear in one eye or in both eyes.
All of these descriptions that you may read
when you look up, for example, what are
the types of headaches are going to give
you a language in order to better convey
to your healthcare practitioner what you're experiencing.
So that if you didn't have this language, if you
didn't go in and learn about these things, then it
would not be as easy for him to get to
the source or for him to get to the specifics.
And some physicians are easier at teasing
this information out of patients than others.
But if you want to be really sure about
how you're sharing this information with your physician, really
sure how you describe your symptoms so that you
can get the best possible information then, and intervention
then from your healthcare provider.
The Internet is a great place to develop that language.
It also, when you go to your physician, rather than
going online and saying, I looked it up and I
think I have this disease, which is going to put
him on the defensive most often him or her.
If you go in and you describe very well and
very clearly the symptoms that you're having, as well as
the symptoms you're not having, it's going to demonstrate that
you're willing to learn to research, to interact.
So when I talk about symptoms you're not having,
you could very easily say, I'm having headaches.
It's on both sides of my head.
It feels the same on both sides.
I'm sensitive to light, but I
don't have any blurred vision.
I've not had any nausea.
Okay, so you're being very clear and you're
demonstrating that you can process a variety of
information about this headache, rather than someone coming
in and just saying, my head hurts.
If you go in and say that, you're going to get
kind of some questions, but equal level of information back.
And when we look at stepping into our
health power, when we look at owning our
health, we definitely want to develop the
language around the description of what we're experiencing.
And it's valuable to do that, not only going
online and searching, but really developing that language so
that when we feel something in our body, when
we feel a sensation, we can really think about
what does it feel like?
Am I having a tingling pain?
Am I having an ache? Am I having...
Because when we can be descriptive, when we can
be more discerning about individual types of information and
what we're experiencing, we can not only convey that
better, but we can also get better at figuring
out maybe where it came from, when it started
and what we need to do something about versus
what something is going to pass on its own.
So a big part of having that confidence in dealing
with your health is having the language and having the
ability to discern amongst a variety of symptoms.
So to search or not to search?
Absolutely.
Search names of diseases.
If you think that that's something that you have
going on, or if you have a person in
your in life who has been diagnosed with a
particular disease, yeah, go ahead, google it,
learn more about it in order to ask better questions.
And if you don't have a
specific disease, it's still okay.
Go in, search and develop the language.
So again, this is another
way of asking better questions.
Develop the language around what you're experiencing so that
when you do need to, if you need to
communicate it with the healthcare provider, you're going to
communicate at a higher level and hopefully get higher
level communication coming back to you.
So I hope this has been helpful.
If you have more questions about
Doctor Google, absolutely, let me know.
And if you would like guidance, if you
would like some support working through any kind
of medical situation or condition, reach out.
I'd be happy to talk to you
and potentially we could work together.
So until next week, let's go out and own it.
