How Good a Doctor Are You?
Getting a medical degree is not easy: It requires 10 years of medical education and 16,000 hours of clinical experience to get certified to provide treatment. Even so, most of us think we can make equally as good diagnoses as our doctors—as long as we have a little help from Google.
A Wolters Kluwer poll out this morning finds that not only are most consumers turning to the Internet to answer medical questions, but that they also put strong faith in their own diagnosis. Among college educated Americans, 63 percent say they have “never” misdiagnosed themselves. Add in those who have say they’ve “rarely” made a wrong call and the number jumps up to 84 percent.
More by Sarah Kliff at Ezra Klein’s blog.
This is an interesting finding. Something like 100 million people use the Internet annually to seek information on medical conditions. This may seem like a bad idea considering that becoming a physician “…requires 10 years of medical education and 16,000 hours of clinical experience to get certified to provide treatment.” Yet, your doctor often has only 10 or 15 minutes to diagnose a condition that we describe only in the vaguest of terms. A few hours spent perusing the Internet is probably a good thing. If nothing else, it may half patients better describe their symptoms – possible know more about their condition that the doctor would ever have time to discuss.
Were hypochondriacs included in that poll?
Most people probably ought to check WebMD or some other reputable site before going to the doctor.
From what I’ve heard, some doctors don’t like it when their patients think they know exactly what’s wrong with them because they read something on the internet that told them so.
Hmmm. I think I’m a pretty good doctor.
Demand for goods (internet-enabled self-diagnosis) increases when the price for substitute goods (doctor-provided diagnosis) increases.