Science Alert: Do you ever turn to the internet for medical information? We bet you do. And a new survey shows that if you’re going to the emergency room, looking up your symptoms can actually be a good idea.
Of course, it’s not the right time to Google anything if you’re, say, bleeding profusely from the head. But our ailments are often more ambiguous than that – perhaps it’s a weird intermittent pain somewhere, or just some vague dizziness.Doctors probably suspect that you looked up your symptoms before showing up in their office. But there’s little systematic research on how our relationship with Dr Google might affect real-world interactions with medical professionals, especially in the emergency department (ED).
With that in mind, a team of Australian health researchers set out to survey a representative sample of ED patients in two clinics, St. Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne and Austin Health. They gathered anonymous data from 400 participants.Unsurprisingly, the researchers discovered that more than one-third of the adults did indeed consult the internet about their medical problem before attending the ED. In fact, 49 percent of the survey participants admitted that they searched for online health information regularly.
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