"Nightmare," "annoying," "irritating" and "frustrating"

My mother constantly Googles her symptoms, even the minor ones. I feel it is turning her into a neurotic, obsessed bundle of nerves but when I urge her to stop doing it, she gets angry and accuses me of discouraging her from being “an empowered patient.”

I guess it isn’t just the physicians who find the health-Googlers frustrating and annoying.

They can google all they want. I don’t care. My patients come for my opinion if they don’t want it then so be it, they can go elsewhere

I think it goes both ways. An intelligent, critically-minded layperson with hours of research time might just do a better job figuring certain types of things out than a doctor anxious to get the patient out the door.

I can see how someone might spend hours looking into something and be skeptical when a doctor dismisses all of it with a wave of his or her hand and boots them out the door.

Unfortunately, I think the number of intelligent, critically-minded people out there investigating these things online are in the distant minority, and even then, when a disagreement occurs, the doctor is still probably right.

But like it or not, people are going to be curious, and they’re going to research these things. If a doctor just dismisses it all without an explanation, the patients become skeptical and distrustful. Yes, it’s stupid and irrational to feel that way, but it will still happen. How should we (patients and doctors) deal with that?

When you are a subspecialty physician it doesn’t matter, patients can google till the cows come home. Heck, their whole family can sit around with laptops googling for years they are not going to outdiagnose me period.