Doctors and medical staff, in this new digital and social media era, must understand and empathize their patients and spend enough time to clarify issues presented on the internet.
The widespread use of internet research engines and social media have profoundly changed the way patients manage medical issues and interact with medical professionals. Most patients, as avid users of the internet and social media, presenting with a medical problem or question, instantly “google” everything related to what they think of, including doctors and medical facilities. They retrieve an enormous volume of scattered and mostly irrelevant information about terms, diseases, treatments, medical doctors and clinics around the world. These data are costless, but come with a number of automatically appearing digital advertisements with carefully hidden “precious” information, offering unbeatable solutions or perfect treatments for any problem. Patients are not aware or forget that typing terms free of charge on the internet instantly activates algorithms that directs to paid advertisements to your screen, and may also collect information about your current thoughts, problems, sentiments, and choices. Social media follows delivering pictures, information and opinions relevant to your questions. The most likely result, after this data cataclysm, is that our anxious patient will be misinformed and misleaded. Practically speaking, our patient will have very few chances to navigate through the internet to reach a meaningful conclusion.
However, the internet is a revolutionary progress of mankind that democratizes data, connects people and offers significant help and convenience for medical issues. Professionals can verify the information, but an uneasy patient has no tools and abilities to understand and evaluate it.
Doctors and medical staff, in this new digital and social media era, must understand and empathize their patients and spend enough time to clarify issues presented on the internet.
General rules must be deployed such as knowing who posts the data, whether it comes from institution or an unidentifiable post, whether there are names, addresses, or if there is reliable information about those who post. We ought to doubt and even match the data with similar information, and question if the information is reasonable or “too good to be true”? The biggest challenge today is how to get the best from the digital world and avoid being deceived.
Patients coming to our office spend most of the time wanting to discuss questions about their digital research, analyzing fancy treatments and procedures that cure everything rather than focus on their presented problems.
Infertility and IVF treatments seem to be a good substrate for misinformation since, normally, few treatments are evidence-based and the IVF success has a significant factor of randomness.
Therefore, medical staff must be updated as to what the “google” searches and social media currently address about relevant medical questions, and be prepared with the proper arguments to persuade patients asserting their professional view. In our times, a new medication or treatment is first released to digital and social media, and then to scientific peer-reviewed journals. Infertility and IVF treatments seem to be a good substrate for misinformation since, normally, few treatments are evidence-based and the IVF success has a significant factor of randomness. Patients easily mistrust scientific information, and tend to adapt strange medical beliefs, showing skepticism for scientific approaches and finally developing a broken patient-doctor relationship and trust.
Doctors and medical staff, in this new digital and social media era, must understand and empathize their patients and spend enough time to clarify issues presented on the internet. Thus, in addition to providing proper scientific advises and treatments, doctors are also responsible for successfully guiding the patients through digital and social media misinformation, in order to deliver the best treatment for them with lower costs and the fewer side effects. The winner of this “battle” must be science and patients.