IT'S AN OLD Sex and the City joke, but most of us have fallen for it. Feeling a bit under the weather and not wanting to pay the money or spend time visiting a doctor, you type your symptoms into the internet, hit return and bingo.
Your seemingly benign symptoms turn out to be terminal. We may be an educated population, but there's something about seeing an opinion in writing that can persuade us we are reading scientific fact rather than speculation or marketing spin designed to sell a product.
Turning to the internet, where there's little monitoring of the myriad sites offering diagnosis and suggestions for self-medication, seems a casual approach to something as important as our health, but doctors such as Alvin Chan Yee-shing, who has been practising for 27 years, says patients are turning to the internet in increasing numbers.
'It seems to be quite common practice,' says the paediatrician from his surgery in Mongkok. 'It means the parents are making a judgment, yet they have no training as a doctor. A wrong diagnosis could be disastrous.'
Years ago, we'd have had to spend hours combing through specialist books in a library. Now, minutes of research on the internet can make doctors of us all.
Learning more about a condition you have or the possible side effects of suggested medications can be a good thing, but the risk is that people are making decisions from a narrow perspective without the full facts or scientific training.