In early January, Jody Brannon was breaking out in hives for the first time in her life. She didn’t know if the stress of working long hours was the cause. Neither did her doctor.
“The calls to the doctor produced nothing,” she recalled. “So I went on the Internet.”
The decision was familiar enough territory for Brannon. She is managing editor of news operations for the Washington Post’s on-line site (www.washingtonpost.com) and supervised the “launch” of the newspaper’s Internet health site last April. What’s more, Brannon classifies herself among the growing number of patients who have the potential to “know a little more than my doctors do” by checking out health information on the Web. She made the point at a recent “E-health” forum sponsored by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
Depending on which organization is doing the analysis, it is estimated somewhere between 12 percent and nearly 50 percent of people with access to the Internet are using it at least sometimes for health information. Just two years ago, the percentages were in the single digits.
In Brannon’s case, she figured maybe her asthma medication was the problem. She started her search for information at the Post’s Web site, but the new drug her doctor prescribed wasn’t on the database. She visited four other sites with good reputations to look through their drug databases. Nothing.
Then she logged onto www.WebMD.com. There she found out her new drug could indeed cause hives as a side effect. She stopped taking the pills and called her doctor, who prescribed a different medication for controlling Brannon’s asthma without the hives.
So Brannon’s Internet search came with a happy ending. More important to Dr. Ricardo Martinez, also on the Northwestern panel, was Brannon’s act of “closing the loop” by talking to her doctor about her decision to stop taking the medication. He didn’t mind the plug for WebMD.com, either, because he is senior vice president of health affairs for the Internet site.
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Martinez said a “healthier relationship” between doctor and patient can be a powerful legacy for Internet health sites. Along with helping patients prepare for doctor visits, there might be even greater rewards afterward.
“Studies show most patients don’t remember (the details) of interactions with doctors,” he said. “Questions come later. I have physician friends who are answering a lot of those questions on-line for patients, usually with nurses doing the followup. The flow of communication is much better.”
He urged health consumers to seek their own levels of informationnot a surprising stance for a guy who works for a health-oriented Web site–but also to remember the “knowledge and experience” of doctors can still prove quite valuable.
Just what level of information patients are seeking is a highly individual matter. Some consumers want simple explanations, panelists said, while others can’t print out enough documentation.
Bill Silberg is executive editor for www.medscape.com, a site started in 1995 to provide research information to doctors and other health professionals. He estimated about 500,000 registered members on the site, or about one-third of the total visitors, are consumers seeking the most detailed medical studies.
“People no longer have to go through a `learned intermediary’ or interpreter for their health information,” said Silberg, a former editor at the Journal of the American Medical Association. “The (person with) a chronic condition who has been getting information from the National Academy of Sciences and the National Library of Medicine probably does know more than his or her physician.”
If you ask Jody Brannon, she’ll tell you there’s nothing wrong with that.
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Next week: Exploring alternative medicine on the Internet.
To contact Bob Condor or find an archive of his columns, visit chicagotribune.com/go/health
His e-mail is [email protected]