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The Pros and Cons of Online Self-Diagnosis

How to Discuss Your Medical Research with Your Doctor

Feb 5, 2009 Richard Mankiewicz

Many health and medical websites give patients the opportunity to self-diagnose many conditions, but they are not a substitute for personal professional medical advice.

The internet is filled with websites about health and medicine. Some have good advice, recent news and links to further more detailed information. It is therefore not surprising that many people have resorted to self-diagnosing their conditions online. Although knowledge is always useful there are a few things to be aware of before concluding that you have some rare tropical disease.

Support Groups and Forums

If you already have either a suspected or confirmed diagnosis the best source of advice is from an online support group. There are support groups and forums for virtually every known illness and these will be a mine of personal information about symptoms, medications and the reality of their side-effects. The collective knowledge at these websites may also help you to better understand your precise condition and possibly even lead you to suspect that a tentative diagnosis may need to be looked at more closely.

Self-Diagnosing on Medical Websites

At some stage most people will search for all the possible conditions that may manifest certain symptoms. Some medical websites are better than others and it really boils down to a personal choice in how the information is presented. The usual procedure is to look at the key symptoms, then read each condition and compare whether other listed symptoms are also present or not. One will then end up with either a short or rather long list but rarely will there be just one obvious disease. The problem here is that medical websites do not show which symptoms are the most important.

Problems with Self-Diagnosing

These medical websites are run on fairly simple databases matching symptoms and conditions. They are good in getting a short-list of possible conditions but they should not be relied upon to hone this list down to just one major suspect. It is even possible to have all the listed symptoms of a particular condition but also to have one very important extra condition that would rule out that particular diagnosis. That kind of analysis is not yet available online and this is where the knowledge and experience of a medical professional is invaluable.

Research the Medical Tests Needed

One other thing that medical self-diagnosis websites are good for is to check which tests are necessary for each potential condition on the short-list. These may be specific blood tests, perhaps some physical tests or even an X-ray or MRI scan. Write it all down listing the condition, the symptoms and the necessary tests to confirm the diagnosis. Armed with all this knowledge it is important to now seek your doctor's opinion on this.

Discussing Your Research with the Specialist

It becomes evident very quickly that, knowing your medical history and personal symptoms, the doctor will quickly eliminate many of the most unlikely diagnoses. At this point it might happen that there are still a small number of possible conditions left. The doctor should at this point consider testing for the most likely one. Both the pros and cons of online self-diagnosing have become obvious. It is good to be informed but where a website may be good at listing potential illnesses it is not so good at discarding those for which some vital symptom is lacking. This is where a doctor's experience is crucial.

The copyright of the article The Pros and Cons of Online Self-Diagnosis in General Medicine is owned by Richard Mankiewicz. Permission to republish The Pros and Cons of Online Self-Diagnosis in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Discuss Your Self-diagnosis