Dr. Google

When you first start out as a doctor, you're very nervous about letting people know that you are absolutely clueless. I can recall many a time that I made an excuse to leave the room as an intern so that I could go look up something. Patients already look at you with a suspicious eye since they know you're new. If they catch you trying to figure out the dose of insulin you should give them on Google, its adios amigos.

As I've progressed through residency, I'm much less shy about using my tools to my advantage. Smartphones have taken over as the must have resident resource. Residents twenty years ago would carry around huge books in their pockets as reference. I have all of that plus more in the palm of my hand. I can even order dinner and text my wife while I look something up. Pretty cool in my opinion.

As a consequence, I've huddled around my iPhone with several patients to look up an answer we're seeking. I've found my patients to be much more trusting of me when I will simply admit that there are some things that I don't know. It helps that I have had some attending physicians that I work under model this well. When you are exchanging journal articles with patients like some of them are, then you have a reached a new level of patient physician collaboration. There are a lot of times that answers are hard to find or not cut and dry, and I enjoy my job much more when I can simply be honest about that.

I don't think that this iDoc revolution is going to change any time soon. If anything, technology is going to come into the exam room more and more. It's our responsibility as doctors to figure out how to appropriately use it so that its helpful and not a hindrance to our relationship with our patients. By the time HumorMD Jr is in med school (haha, we'll see!), I'm hoping that we'll have the technology to simply record the appointment and transcribe it into a note for the medical record. I'm sure people are working on this. If not, I thought of it first and am awaiting my royalty check. 60% of all sales will do. Don't want to get too greedy.

Seriously though, don't freak out when your doctor pulls out his smartphone or fires up the computer in front of you. He has the entire medical literature at his fingertips. Let him use it. Would you rather he be confidently wrong or humbly correct? I'll take the humility all day, and so should you.