My PCP and I have a really good rapport, and so when I stated having weird confusing health problems they were quite happy to hear what I was finding in PubMed and then share their thoughts on it, and together we figured things out and got my situation handled. I thought it was a nicely complementary situation: they didn’t have the time to do a literature dive, and I didn’t have the expertise to fully understand what I was reading.
But I bet what happens more often is patients showing up with random unsubstantiated crap they found on Reddit or a content farm, and I can understand health care providers getting worn down by that sort of thing. I have a family member who believed he had Morgellon’s Disease, and talking to him about it was exhausting.
> Morgellons (/mɔːrˈɡɛlənz/) is the informal name of a self-diagnosed, scientifically unsubstantiated skin condition in which individuals have sores that they believe contain fibrous material.[1][2] Morgellons is not well understood, but the general medical consensus is that it is a form of delusional parasitosis,[3] on the psychiatric spectrum.[4]
Your family member... mistakenly believed that he had a psychiatric condition involving a mistaken belief?
But I bet what happens more often is patients showing up with random unsubstantiated crap they found on Reddit or a content farm, and I can understand health care providers getting worn down by that sort of thing. I have a family member who believed he had Morgellon’s Disease, and talking to him about it was exhausting.