My advice: don’t do it.
You could do it. But expect for a long-winded, circumferential attempt to deduce a diagnosis that is unlikely there. We may be a better search engine than WebMD, but not by much. See, our time is devoted to learning about the pathophysiology, down to which molecule went wrong. Patients don’t want to hear about molecules, they want to learn about how a disease might affect their lifestyle. When we hear hoofbeats, we look for zebras, instead of horses. I don’t blame our desire to flex our knowledge of medical science: we’ve spent a lot of time and money in learning the minutiae. But it’s going to be about how we translate these details into meaningful advice and content that patients can take with them.
For example, I have a family member who has high blood pressure and asked if this was a problem. Immediately I started asking questions: onset, is there pain, do you have shortness of breath, fatigue, any family history, any other diseases? And in my mind, every diagnosis under the sun becomes evident (could this be that case of pheochromocytoma I’ve been reading about?). I’m excited about the clinical years; it’ll be a chance to learn how to make the science meaningful to patients.
