Dr. Jane Smith Self-Diagnoses Interview

Dr. Jane Smith Self-Diagnoses Interview

Almost 1 in 3 people said they were likely to search the internet for information about their symptoms before they visited their doctor, new research from NPS* has found.

During Be Medicinewise Week, NPS is urging people to ask the right questions about their health and medicines, so they get the information they need to make better informed decisions.

NPS Head of Programs Karen Kaye says that while there is a lot of information on the internet about medical conditions and the medicines to treat them, it can be difficult to find information you can trust.

"Some of the health information that can be found online is accurate, but some of it is not," says Ms Kaye.
"The advantage of speaking directly with a health professional about your health questions is that they can take your individual circumstances into account when they provide advice."

There are strategies people can use to help them decide if the medical or health information they find on the internet is what they need - accurate, unbiased and up to date.

"One medicinewise strategy is to use good sites that you can keep going back to, rather than searching the entire internet," says Ms Kaye.

"Reading several different articles about a topic gives you different perspectives and a better likelihood of getting balanced information than just referring to one website."

NPS has online information hubs on a range of health conditions and related medicines at www.nps.org.au/conditions

Another good resource for information on a medicine is the consumer medicine information (CMI) leaflet which is available by using the search function on the NPS website at www.nps.org.au

NPS has the following tips for those researching symptoms and treatments online:
* Use good-quality websites that are relevant, unbiased, evidence-based and up-to-date.
* Beware sites that offer revolutionary, new or miracle cures - if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is!
* Discuss any information you find on the internet with your doctor or other health professional.

Dr. Jane Smith Self-Diagnoses Interview

Question: How often do patients self-diagnose before going to their GP?

Dr. Jane Smith: Two thirds of the time patients self-diagnose, roughly speaking and patients self-treat about half the time.


Question: What are the positives and negatives associated with self-diagnoses?

Dr. Jane Smith: There is a pyramid effect to self-diagnoses because if you are feeling unwell enough to go and seek help, that is a form of self-diagnoses. However, we are talking about a higher order where patients self-label and say "I've got cancer" or "I've got the flu" or "I've got bronchitis". To some extent patient empowerment and capacity to self-manage and understand what is going on is a very good thing; the other side of the coin is where patients get very scared and anxious by believing they have a very serious health condition that in actual fact they haven't got.

Self-diagnoses can be a good and a bad thing and the most important thing is that the communication channels are open and everybody knows exactly what is going on. It is helpful for the GP to know when the patient is worried they have a certain disease; patients don't always want to tell their GP that they have gone to a search engine and got information. Communication is important and a patient should feel safe to disclose that they did self-diagnoses.

Self-diagnoses is a very common behaviour these days and the more important safety issues are self-medicating because it appears that half of the General Practice patients are self-treating with something, which is not always a medicine. Self-diagnoses and self-medicating needs to be openly declared all the time as a GP may prescribe other medications when a patient is already on a whole stack of other medications that they have self-medicated with whether they be paracetamol, codeine, anti-histamines, anti-flu drugs, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and all sorts of herbs and vitamin supplements that they're self-administrating; this might also include recycling medication they have been supplied in the past. It is a safety issue if self-treating is not openly declared and the GP prescribes other medication.


Question: What is your advice for patients who commonly research their symptoms prior to seeing a GP?

Dr. Jane Smith: Take the research and information with a pinch of salt because there is a very high chance of getting it wrong as it is much easier for a GP to diagnose an illness when they're dealing with the raw symptoms (what people are feeling, what is going on) rather than what a patient thinks they should be feeling having researched on a search engine. One needs to deconstruct the beliefs which corrupts the process of diagnoses because the moment you think you have something and you feel a lift of symptoms and signs you believe you should have - you start thinking you have something whether you do or not because of the power of suggestion.

If you self-diagnose you can make yourself incredibly anxious and worried because you think you have something absolutely ghastly wrong with you. It is very useful to know as a GP or any type of treating health practitioner that self-diagnoses is occurring so the worries can be addressed and reduce the harm caused by anxiety.


Question: Do you find the 'power of suggestion' is a similar issue when a patient researches the side effects associated with a certain medication they are prescribed?

Dr. Jane Smith: It does depend on the personality. It is good to be informed about the potential side effects associated with a certain medication but the side effect information is often a legal disclaimer and doesn't really give clear priorities to what is important and what is not. The power of suggestion is there but sometimes it is more important to inform and educate people of the side effects of a particular drug so they know what to watch out for. It is certainly a two-way street.


Question: What do you believe has caused the uptrend in self-diagnoses and self-treatment?
Dr. Jane Smith: I believe the uptrend has been caused by the ability to access information as it is so easy to type in a few keyword symptoms in a search engine. I can honestly say I haven't asked patients who are self-diagnosing why they are doing it, which is more in-depth but the fact that there is almost universal access to the internet, these days, makes it easy to look for information. We've gone from looking up information in telephone directories to looking things up on the internet and we've gone from reading maps to internet maps and the same thing is occurring with health seeking behaviour.


Interview by Brooke Hunter