What your GP really thinks about Doctor Google

Looking online for medical insights and advice can be both a help and a hindrance

It’s now so common for my patients to have first Googled their symptoms and likely diagnosis by the time I see them as a GP, that I routinely ask what they’ve found. It’s great that we have so much health information freely available, but the flip side to this is that diseases are rarely simple and information online can (and does often) lead to inaccurate assumptions and either under- or over-self-diagnosis.