Today's parents solve their children's health problems in very different ways than they did even five years ago.
In the past, they may have called a friend or a mother-in-law for advice. Now, parents call Telehealth, check with Dr. Google, discuss treatment strategies on chat lines and e-mail experts for timely advice.
Last month, in response to this change, the Canadian Paediatric Society issued guidelines for parents on how to use the Internet. Their suggestions range from understanding what features to look for in a good website to tips for dealing with teens who are constantly on Facebook.
It is debatable whether parents' wired strategy works better than a traditional one. Downsides include "cyberchondria," or Internet-induced fear of a terrible diagnosis, and being marketed health products that don't work.
Most parents view being wired as a complementary rather than an either-or proposition. Health professionals are of a mixed mind, but most believe there is a good middle ground where parents become more informed, but are not diagnosing their child who has the sniffles with rare leukemia.
It can be tough, when clicking your way through various cyber-health resources, to discriminate between good information and bad advice. What follows is a look at what I think are some of the best resources for parents who are searching beyond a visit to the clinic.
Let's say Angus, your five-year-old, has a cough with fever, stuffy nose and a slight wheeze. Otherwise he looks okay. At this stage you want to make sure his symptoms are not serious, you want a diagnosis and an effective treatment, especially one that you could implement at home.
Let's start with the diagnosis. Begin with the "symptom checker" services of WebMD, Mayo Clinic or EasyDiagnosis. WebMD offers 20 possible diagnoses for Angus. You can continue to check out the ones you think are relevant.
The problem with this site is that 20 diagnoses are too many and, in my opinion, you need help prioritizing. Diagnosis can be a tricky business, since we want to consider all options from the common to the rare and the benign to the serious.
At MayoClinic.com the symptom checker gives you eight possible diagnoses and prioritizes them based on how many of the symptoms correlate with each problem. For example, three symptoms could be cold-related, but just one (the wheeze) makes us think of asthma. This is better, but the problem is that it's difficult to tell how likely it is to be asthma as opposed to a common cold.
EasyDiagnosis.com narrows it down to three possibilities and informs you that Angus has a 77 per cent chance of having a cold, a 15 per cent chance of having asthma and an 8 per cent chance of having pneumonia, which sounds about right.
I love this precision. The questions are more in-depth and mimic what I ask in the clinic. I would use it all the time, but the only catch is that the site has only worked out the math for a limited set of symptoms.
At this point, after trawling the sites, you are thinking it is probably a cold, maybe asthma, possibly pneumonia (or a combination thereof).
Now you need a management plan. As you look for a course of action, you may encounter a major conundrum of Web medicine: Some of the most useful sites are funded by industry, and bias can be an issue.
For example, WebMD declares that anything marked as "sponsored" is not reviewed by the WebMD editorial department for accuracy, objectivity or balance. This sounds easy to differentiate, but as I surf through the site I am aware of the subtle pushing of new medications. The Mayo Clinic site is not quite as rich a resource, but the line between advertising and editorial content is much clearer.
