Health Stories: Asking the Doctor a Question Armed with the Answer

When I told Avi, an editor in Dallas, about my health research, he responded, “It’s coincidental that I had an Internet health moment this week.” Avi had switched to a generic SSRI anti-depressant from a name-brand and was feeling poorly.

The Web sites Avi used were the FDA, a mental-health news clearinghouse/portal, and, a respected online forum for patients using anti-depressants. He went on to say that this “online research showed a high probability that the nasty symptoms I’ve experienced the last couple of weeks are due to my switching from a name-brand drug to a generic version.”

Avi continued, “With the Web information in hand, I talked to my doc and the pharmacist, went back to my old med, and, today, I’m feeling much, much better. Did I need the Web for this? Not necessarily; a phone call to my doc may have done the same thing. What the Web did was immediately confirm the strong probability between the generic med and my symptoms, which allowed me to start the chain of events necessary to fix the problem.”
 
I asked Avi why he turned to the Web first. He said, “It’s a convenient, fast filter/information source, and I trust my Web-research skills. Moreover, I didn’t stop after doing my surfing; it was just a first pass at the information available before I called my doc, to whom I didn’t say, ‘Hey, all these blokes out on the Web are going through hell with this generic, get me off of this stuff!’ Rather, I first had a discussion with my pharmacist to find out if she had had similar feedback from her patients on the same drug. Then, with information from three serious, medically respected Web sites and my pharmacist’s comments in hand, I called my doc and simply asked him if there could be a causal link between my switch to the generic and my symptoms. If he had said no, I would have cited the evidence I had in hand that appeared to suggest a link. But, he didn’t, so I didn’t have to go beyond the initial question.”

Avi concluded, “So, there’s my story. Not very dramatic.” But it exemplifies both the empowered healthcare consumer who trusted his information literacy skills, and also the lack of disclosure about the use of the Internet that so frequently occurs between patients and doctors. (A.G., private correspondence, 8/5/08 and 8/6/08).