In (qualified) defense of Dr. Google

As managing editor of the Medical Post, you can imagine how many times I’ve come across doctors expressing how much they hate it when patients (largely with no real research skills) come in with a bevvy of health worries because they’ve gone down the Google rabbit hole. Now, I will be freely catty: The majority of adults have no idea how to use the mind-bogglingly powerful tool that Google actually is. Wander into any corner of the internet and you’ll find people espousing virtually any random nonsense as cold hard fact because they’ve never been taught how to identify a reliable source. But when you’re presented with almost infinite information, it can be hard not to click if you’re wondering about something. Read: The rise of ‘Dr. Google’: The risks of self-diagnosis and searching symptoms online Two winters ago, I found myself suffering from a roster of confusing and alarming symptoms. My fingers and toes would start in with pins and needles for no obvious reason. My complex migraines with aura (which previously only happened a couple times a year) started clustering until I was practically always suffering from prodrome or postdrome if not actually in the acute stage. I also had strange headaches that weren’t exactly painful—more like an invisible hand was gripping the back of my head. I had brain fog (which sounds fake until it’s happening to you), balance problems, blurred vision, trouble reading, and as a result was managing a perpetual anxiety attack because of how scared these symptoms made me. When I spoke to my sister on the phone about it one evening, she told me I sounded concussed. But I hadn’t smacked my head, to my knowledge. It being mid-pandemic, I had a couple of phone calls with my family doctor, and another doctor at the same practice. I was advised to take a vitamin B complex supplement and magnesium citrate. Those did help somewhat, but none of the problems went away. I have PCOS, so diabetes is always a concern, so I went in for bloodwork and that was ruled out. I was sent for an MRI (at this point I was concerned I had a CSF leak), but all came back normal. I was sent to a sports medicine specialist who put electrodes on me to perform tests on my nervous system. He told me that, if anything, my responses were a bit ‘brisk.' Read: Was there burnout in the olden days? All this time, I’d been deep in the Google rabbit hole about my symptoms. Indeed, because I’d recently started at the Medical Post, I was experiencing some version of so-called Medical Student Syndrome, where I started to wonder whether I had practically every new ailment I learned about. Sometime around February 2021, it occurred to me that the only significant medical anything that had changed prior to the onset of all my symptoms was that I’d had a progesterone IUD put in. (As an aside, you hear so many stories about hormonal birth control changing a woman’s mood for the worse, but I had just the opposite experience. Having suffered from some pretty serious mood disorders since developing PCOS, since getting the IUD, I’ve become far less anxious, depressed and irritable.) Read: 7 ways citizens can help the healthcare crisis I began to Google like mad. And to my amazement, most of my symptoms were listed plain as day as potential side effects resulting from how progesterone-based birth control can inhibit the absorption of certain key nutrients. I found both medical journal articles and consumer-facing journalism on the topic. The key upshot was that these side effects of peripheral neuropathy and other puzzling neurological issues are quite common with women who choose this form of birth control. However, given the other rare but gruesome problems that can occur with an IUD, family doctors rarely end up making it that far down the list of potential side effects during the often brief discussion about this birth control option. So, I went to my pharmacy and loaded up on supplements of what I theoretically wasn’t absorbing (finding selenium in a small enough quantity was tricky) and called my doctor. She told me I may well be right and to go ahead with the supplements. I started taking them. In a month, I was entirely back to normal. There are, of course, countless factors that can aid or hinder a physician in the art of medicine. And a little knowledge for a worried patient can certainly be a dangerous thing. But in my dubious and meandering journey of self-diagnosis, I can say that Dr. Google didn’t turn out to be a complete quack—at least this time around. Martha Porado is the managing editor of the Medical Post and Pharmacy Practice + Business.

In (qualified) defense of Dr. Google

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