The Armchair Doctor (Dangers of Online Self-Diagnosis)

Alan Probe is moronic pizza delivery boy who meets Dr. Bleed, a disgraced surgeon who teaches him “the art”. Instead of proper surgical instruments, Alan uses every day objects such as a pizza cutter to cut open a skin, a stapler to close deep wounds, and a lighter to seal small ones. He is the Amateur Surgeon and it’s one of my favorite games from the App Store.

This is all fine when it’s just a game, but in real life, even the best of us can’t help but play doctors, especially with all the information about medicine, diseases, and procedures online.

The medical profession has an astounding presence online. From a specialized clinic’s (e.g. eye doctors) website to databases for published journals. Anybody can find some organic recipe or a cocktail of prescription meds to cure everything from world hunger to the common cold.

Now there’s nothing wrong with all this information online. If I want to find out the best rhinoplasty surgeon for an Asian woman, a little digging and will lead me to several forums that say the best place, really is either Japan or Korea. Apparently, the nose doctors there will give you an end result that doesn’t erase your ethnicity.

On a less shallow note, when my brother was diagnosed arteriovenous malformation in his brain, which, to be simplistic about it, means an abnormal connection between the veins and the arteries, my mom and I scoured through countless articles on the subject. We also found a doctor in the UCLA Medical Center (through the recommendation of a local neuro-surgeon, of course, but we did Google the American doctor) whose diagnosis and suggested course of action matched our expectations the best.

All this information is empowering for the patient. For the first time, people are able to call on a doctor’s bullshit or at the very least, ask the right questions. The problem lies with filtering between sound medical advice and information that is just wrong. On another level, sound medical advice is useless if the diagnosis is wrong – and it is likely that either arrogance or ignorance pushes as to self-diagnose.

This is exacerbated by the laxity of pharmaceutical practices and policies. Locally, you can get antibiotics and birth control pills over the counter, whereas elsewhere, these require a prescription. Alongside the beauty industry’s boom, you can buy vials online that promise to remove fine lines, acne, and give you Corona bond paper white skin, even if the use of these should be strictly performed or supervised by a licensed physician.

This is not to suggest the regulation of information as that would be ten steps backwards. The positive benefits of this access to medical knowledge obviously outweigh the disadvantages. It’s not even alarming when a person, in the process of self-diagnosis, hurts himself. But the moment he starts playing witch doctor, armed with his internet MD, and injures others, then we have a problem. The world doesn’t need another Alan Probe running free outside an iPhone.