I think they're misusing google

[redbird]

I have just told a complete stranger on the Internet to get her partner emergency medical care ASAP. I shouldn't have had to do this: but she shouldn't have dealt with the situation by, apparently, googling, finding an old blog thread on "A simple bump on the head can kill you," and posting to describe a concussion followed immediately by slurred speech and trouble finding words, and a day later by continuous headache and the person saying he couldn't think straight.

This is what the emergency number, NHS Direct, and maybe the Mayo Clinic website are for.

I hope she sees and follows my advice. (The person whose blog it is answered a similar comment on the same post from some months ago with "we don't dispense medical advice here, but I suggest getting him medical care." But I'm not a doctor, so the constraints on me are different and, in this case, I think lesser.)

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

As a regular patient of Dr Google myself, I must say that's plain scary!

[aquaeri]

I just did a first aid course last week, and "I suggest you get medical attention ASAP" doesn't constitute medical advice in Australia at least. Telling someone they don't need medical advice is medical advice.

[leora.livejournal.com]

Many years ago I learned to be disturbed by what people will go to the internet to deal with. I was an IRC operator. Kind of like being low-level staff on LJ for a rough comparison of what that means. We dealt with problems on the IRC network.

Someone came to me saying how he thought an intruder had entered his home. After a brief o.O moment, I told him to call the police. There are things that online people can help with, and then there are times for the proper real world emergency services.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Even for an MD, I think, "...suggest getting ... medical care" should be "strongly urge...". Mind you, "a day [or two} later" this would probably consist of "keep under observation", and might well be unnecessary, or too late, but even so....

(About a year ago, I tripped on a hose while working in the yard, fell flat on my face, & drove to Kaiser to get a few stitches where my forehead had hit the edge of a paving-stone. Despite a complete lack of concussion symptoms, they did a CAT-scan. How much that had to do with them practicing Good Medicine and how much with "Medicare will pay for it, and we have the machine & Technicians otherwise unoccupied" isn't clear, but it is certain that obvious symptoms of concussion call for medical attention.)

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Well, my brother did almost the same thing, but he tripped over a stepping stone and hit his forehead on another. He turned out to have enough damage inside that he has a metal plate there now. He doesn't have Medicare, though...

(His wife screamed and screamed and their 8-year-old daugher called 911.)

[elisem.livejournal.com]

Asynchronous communication is handy for many things, but getting emergency medical assessment is not one of them.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

When I had concussion you still yelled at me to go to the doctor. I did in fact only go to the doctor because everyone yelled at me.

Of course, going to the doctor in that particular instance was a waste of time, but even so.

[elisem.livejournal.com]

There is that.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

It makes perfect sense when a person doesn't know if the medical situation is an emergency or not. It's obvious to some of us that a head bonk with lingering neurological symptoms is urgent and potentially fatal...but not everybody knows that. Some people don't know, and aren't experienced enough to know who to call for a quick, free, consultation. (NHS Direct or the Mayo Clinic website, as Redbird mentioned. A lot of hospitals have websites or hotlines. I call my doctor's office, for weird stuff.* Sometimes they say, "Don't panic, consult a doctor in a day or two if you don't start to feel better," sometimes they say, "Go directly to an emergency room.")

If someone in the US has insurance with a large deductible, it can be EXPENSIVE to go to the emergency room. (And it's usually people on tight budgets who get the insurance plans with big deductibles, isn't it?) In many places, it's always expensive to call an ambulance. If someone in the US has no insurance, they might well be afraid of ending up with hospital bills that will destroy their credit and leave them homeless and unemployable. I can understand trying to investigate the matter before taking a risk like that.


*Some years back, when I had been taking Topamax for a few months, I started having a new kind of weird visual symptoms on a weekend when my housemates were traveling. I couldn't tell if the intermittent blurriness and sense that everything was far away was a new kind of seizure, and the pain was behind my eyes, or if this was the "seek immediate medical attention if either of these rare but very serious eye problems occur: sudden vision changes (e.g. blurred vision), eye pain/redness." I called my doctor's office, and consulted the doctor on call, who told me not to worry. Still fretting, I posted to alt.support.migraine...where a couple of regulars told me not to be an idiot about something that could well be secondary angle closure glaucoma, that "seek emergency medical attention" meant to go to the ER. So I went, and they measured the pressure in my eyes, and I didn't have glaucoma, just a scary new partial-seizure symptom.

[elisem.livejournal.com]

I sit corrected. Though posting a question to a defunct blog thread (as I understand the original description) is not quite the same thing as doing research. Or at least not the same thing as doing research successfully, if they post the question, post again the next day, and then sit there hoping somebody will tell them the answer. Which isn't really what you were describing -- but that was what I was taking issue with when I said what I said.

I sure didn't say it very well, though.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

Oh, sure. The combination of posting to a defunct blog thread and not having any idea a bad concussion is a medical emergency points to disturbing cluelessness. (If the injured person were asking, it might look like confusion related to the concussion. When somebody else asks *about* the injured person, it's just clueless.) If the person were posting to an old blog thread about something less well-known to be dire, I'd regard it differently.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Wow. Exactly.

Although, otoh, it's probably not a new phenomenon, although I don't know whether the internet has made it a lot more prevalent: I expect many people would have phoned a friend or similar in similar circumstances, but that just wouldn't be recorded in public...

[redbird]

Phoning a friend wouldn't feel quite as weird; this is more like getting the friend's answering machine and just leaving a message, without knowing whether they'll be home that day.

[elisem.livejournal.com]

Yep. It's the defunct blog thread, the post, and the second post -- those are what get me. The person might not know what an old blog thread is, and may be sitting there waiting for a reply.