I remember during residency, one of our most arrogant attendings was finishing up with a patient himself. When he came out of the room, he handed the resident a huge stack of papers that he had printed from the internet on fibromyalgia.
"I gave a copy of this to the patient," he said. "Put it in the dictation."
"It's from Wikipedia," she said, baffled.
"Yeah, so?" he said. "I love Wikipedia."
Sometimes words fail you.
That's so awesome. I can't wait to be an attending.
ReplyDeleteWhat I love about this story is that most doctors have such an attitude about patients who consult Dr. Google on certain things. And yet....
ReplyDeleteWell, it IS fibromyalgia....
ReplyDeleteLOL +1
DeleteI once had a gyn (who also refused to fill my oc rx) give me a printout from about.com. I never went back to her.
ReplyDeleteWikipedia is awesome for basic info, I use it all the time as a med student :D
ReplyDeleteSame!
DeleteCouldn't be any worse than what exists currently about fibromyalgia... antidepressants and PT work. Pt with fibromyalgia seem to be very responsive to the placebo effect, so any alternative treatments that aren't too expensive and don't have nasty side effects may be helpful as well. Anything else is gilding the lily, but fibromyalgia patients seem to be very responsive to that, too...
ReplyDeleteLast year I had pityriasis rosea & I self-dx, but was pregnant at the time, so I went to my doctor. She googled it with me right there to double check :)
ReplyDeleteI've finally gotten access to a decent set of patient education through our EMR, but prior to that, for anything even the slightest bit unusual, I would google the topic, then read through whatever popped up until I found one that seemed accurate and readable and hand it to the patient. If that site was Wikipedia, they'd get Wikipedia. I don't quite see what the problem is.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that my six year old daughter could edit Wikipedia if she wanted and put up information about fibromyalgia and that's what you'd be handing to the patient.
DeleteShe could, but Wikipedia's 'bots' that automatically scour edits are remarkably good at identifying and removing inaccuracies.
DeleteI guess I always read through the material to make sure that your 6-year-old hasn't been editing it. I just assumed your attending did that as well. Hopefully, he would be able to recognize any blatant untruths and give the patient something from a different source.
DeleteWikipedia has similar rates of errors to other general-purpose encyclopedias.
ReplyDelete