Hey Doctor Pandas, When Was A Time That You Were Glad Your Patients Diagnosed Themselves? (Closed)
When were you glad that some searched up their symptoms and saved their own life. What were they correct about.
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Ok, so first a disclaimer - used to be a doctor but have since changed careers, so no longer practicing clinically.
I have two points of view on this.
The first is as a doctor. Presenting to you with a diagnosis of their own illness is one of the most annoying things a patient can do. This does not help anyone, including the patient. Doctors train for many many years to be able to diagnose correctly, and the skills learned cannot be replicated simply by googling the internet for symptoms. You are also leading the doctor to think in a particular way, which may prevent them from thinking openly about your problem, which in turn may lead to the wrong diagnosis. So don't do it. If you really have to, at least wait until the doctor has finished his diagnostic process so you don't influence it too early.
Do yourself a favor and simply be very clear about all your symptoms: when they started, when they occur, what makes them better/worse etc. As the great physician William Osler said (to doctors) "Listen to your patient, he is telling you the diagnosis." He didn't mean this literally, of course, but by virtue of listening properly and carefully eliciting information from the patient, the diagnosis can become obvious.
My second point of view is as a patient (more precisely, a medically-trained one). Unfortunately, there are some incompetent doctors out there who are terrible at diagnosing. They may simply diagnose by means of "The most common cause of this symptom is xyz." That is the wrong way to go about diagnosis. Or they might try to use time. "I'm not sure what that is but I don't think it is serious. Come back and see me in 2 weeks if it hasn't gone away." This can be a legitimate strategy, but often it is used to hide incompetence or to get the patient to come back and pay the doctor a second time.
The most valuable advice I can give to patients is to ask this question of the doctor: "What else could it be?" Especially if you are not convinced about the diagnosis. Doctors should always think in terms of possibilities (a differential diagnosis), rather than taking shortcuts. Such shortcuts can result from the flawed method of "most common cause" mentioned above, or as the result of the patient (mis)guiding the doctor by saying "I think I have xyz".
By all means do your research, but let the doctor do their job, unless they seem incompetent in which case you either need to change doctors or push them to consider other possibilities.
