I had a very interesting conversation with a middle-aged doctor last week. He was quite depressed. No, he was angry, absolutely livid.
What was making him so uptight was the internet, or the “damn internet” as he repeatedly called it. The internet may have become one of the finest aids to the medical profession, but it can also be the greatest nuisance.
“Every second person under 40 years of age who comes into my surgery thinks they are a fully qualified doctor,” he snapped. “They already have made a diagnosis of what they are suffering from and I’m just there to confirm their view. If I don’t confirm it, they look at me as though I had two heads and do not know my job.
“They say that the internet makes it quite clear that anybody who has a pain in their side and was waking at night in a sweat etc, etc, had such and such an illness. Now, you are telling me – as my doctor – the internet is wrong,” they protest, deflated.
My doctor friend added that he was constantly battling against this kind of instant computer diagnosis and it was becoming quite annoying and frustrating. Every now and again, the patients were right, but in such cases he would have come up with the same answer any way.
Hasty decisions
It was where there wasn’t agreement the problem arose. Then the battle to persuade the patient that the symptoms they were suffering could be caused by about three things and there would have to be a number of tests carried out to get the definitive answer. In medicine you don’t jump to hasty decisions.
Patients are often disappointed that their ingenuity in scrolling the net’s medical regions have not been rewarded. They had come up with a bum steer. And it can take time and patience to persuade them that they in fact have put two and two together and got 28. “Patients don’t seem to realise that I spent seven hard years in college studying medicine and another couple of decades as a GP. Give me credit, I must have learned something.
“The big problem nowadays is that everybody is a doctor – okay, a quack doctor – who has spent a few hours peering into a computer screen and now, bingo, has all the answers. It can make life quite difficult for me and my colleagues.”
I knew exactly what my doctor was ranting on about. I had been chatting to a colleague some years earlier who told me his doctor did not know what he was suffering from but he would look into it. My colleague then did his own bit of detective work and believed he had a certain illness, a rare disease in fact. He went back to the doctor and made his case, citing chapter and verse. As it transpired, he was right and eventually got better. He did beat the doctor to it. That was a case where the patient came up trumps, but it doesn’t always work out as conveniently.
Cancer diagnosis
Our conversation reminded me of something that happened to me years ago. I woke up one morning with a lot of blood in my mouth. I knew straight away I had lung cancer. It was a morning I will never forget. I was only 22 years old – far too young to die.
I quickly made an appointment to see the local GP. The next day I shuffled into his surgery, the picture of misery, feeling very sorry for myself – the guy on death row, so to speak.
I blurted out my bad news about the blood in my mouth and offered my diagnosis. He looked very serious, opened my mouth, looked around, stuck his finger in and poked it around. After about two minutes he burst out laughing.
Eventually, he composed himself. “Sorry, for laughing. You have bleeding gums. You better see a dentist.”
I nearly jumped up and hugged him. My crisis had ended in a whimper.
That happened more than 50 years ago and I’m still hale and hearty, although I have to wear dentures due to those bad gums.
The above parable is true and I just tell it to show you should not go into a doctor with preconceived ideas or old wives’ tales.
In my case, I had read about lung cancer and blood in the mouth in a Readers’ Digest article some months earlier. It was hugely popular and influential, so I believed what I read.
Now we have the internet giving us all the answers.