You’re feeling sick. Maybe you have a fever or a sore throat or an upset stomach — or maybe you have all three. Maybe you’re having symptoms you’ve never had before. Twenty years ago, you would’ve called the doctor and made an appointment. And you still might do that today. But first, you’re going to go online.
A quick Google search will undoubtedly yield a smattering of sources, all giving you different and likely incorrect diagnoses. A minor ailment is bound to return results that include a variety of fatal conditions, with WebMD being the most infamous of the offenders. We all know this. And yet we do it anyways.
Why do we subject ourselves to this world of unhelpful assumptions and wild exaggerations? In short, it’s because the place where we really want to go — the doctor’s office — can be much, much worse.
Besides the fact that they too can misunderstand or misdiagnose our problems (*cough cough* Student Health Services), going to the doctor takes time, it takes resources, and most of all, it takes money. As exorbitant as the costs of co-pays and medical bills can be, going to the doctor has become many people’s last resort.
Buoy Health, a Boston-based startup, is looking to revolutionize the process of online check-ups. They have created a website for these check-ups in the hopes of diagnosing people’s symptoms more accurately than places like WebMD. The site asks personalized questions from their list of more than 33,000, each based upon the answer to the last. Using age and gender, they will then offer several probable diagnoses out of 1,700 possible results.
But as accuracy of internet resources increases, what we’re facing is a real double-edged sword.
Being able to more confidently diagnose ailments will help people avoid some of the scarier results like tumors and cancers that seem to frequent WebMD. It could help give people peace of mind in the face of minor problems, saving them time and money they would have spent on a trip to the doctor. And if something more serious was going on, this website could tell them that too, and people might not wait so long to get treatment.
But that’s the best case scenario. There is also a real danger to replacing doctors with technology. This website was created to be used in addition to going to the doctor, not instead of it — but people might not treat it that way. There are many diagnoses that require scans and tests, things that surface-level symptoms won’t show. If people gain too much confidence in their online resources, they might forget how important the actual face-to-face interaction with their doctor might be.
Boston is known for being a great city for startups. It’s been ranked the top “startup community” in the United States two years running by U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation. This website speaks to that. Young people here, like the founders of this company, are incorporating more technology into our daily lives, and making it easier for normal people to access otherwise inaccessible things. That’s no small feat.
However, no matter how much this website emphasizes the importance of it being a supplement to doctors, not a replacement, it is still inherently trying to replace one of the functions of our doctors. That’s not necessarily bad, but it is a path on which we must tread lightly.
This new website might not revolutionize anything. It probably won’t. No one logically believes they can diagnose themselves with cancer online, nor should they. But it is indicative of a larger trend we’re seeing — one the internet is helping us realize — a trend towards more knowledge and less guesswork. We are creating a society where a greater number of people are able to have more knowledge about a broader spectrum of information — and that’s a very good thing.
