One night at the orthopedic unit, a 25-year-old woman arrived with an intense pain in her lower back, sharp enough not to let her sleep. At the time of questioning, she shared that she was a healthy person, that every day before going to work she jogs around her block. One morning when she got home and bowed to pet her dog, she felt a stabbing sensation in her lower back. Later on that day, she opted to search on the internet with help from Google some solutions to her problem.
Among the 75.3 million results she found a blog from a passionate athletic where he published that when he felt those "occasional pains" he used analgesic patches to relieve the pain. Thanks to this, she was able to continue her daily workouts, until a couple of days later her pain returned much harder and the patches were not ceasing it, and this had led her to finally go to the hospital.
The results were overwhelming, a herniated disc in the lumbar region between the L5 and S1 vertebrae that was compressing the nerve roots and causing immense pain.
If this person would have gone to a consultation from the first day, she would have gotten an appropriate diagnosis, in this way she would have received the instructions to suspend his physical activity (among others) to prevent the hernia from increasing. Unfortunately, this is the reality that hundreds of people around the world experience every day; they are experiencing a form of discomfort, they searched for their symptoms and they get the indication to consume medicines that can delay the diagnosis of the real problem.
A diagnosis is obtained as a result of comparing not only the patient's symptoms but also considering the area in which she lives, her age, her family history, her current condition, among many other variables that doctors know and can analyze to find the problem. Meanwhile, Google is a search engine that will throw you all the pages that have the words that you write and in the order in which you have written to them. So if you search for "back pain" you will get 1,350,000,000 results, while you write "pain back" you will get 1,110,000,000 results.
We live in a time of disinformation where internet content without an endorsement of any science publishes solutions to problems that, far from solving them, can cause irreparable damage. This is our current society, where topics such as vaccination or cancer treatments are questioned, but people are willing to try anything they have seen on Google or Facebook.
Fake News makes medicine lose credibility and lead people to seek answers to inappropriate sources. The anonymity and openness of the internet to anyone who can produce content and publish it is what gives security to this class of people since they do not have any guarantee commitment.
Izzy Health, Izzy Care's first product, a mobile application where you will find doctors whose experience, transcendence and professionalism will support each diagnosis effectively. Professionals from different areas of health at the same reach as an internet search engine, but with the reliability and confidence that comes from talking to a person directly and clearly, who will know how to diagnose and treat your condition. Your own dedicated team consisting of a primary health physician, nutritionist, and psychotherapist to consult you and pay attention to any damage that Dr. Google has caused at a very low cost.
By Angel Valderrabano, Medical student at Instituto Politécnico Nacional Mexico