Connection: Communication Is Key
The Internet brings Spokane surgical oncologist Dr. Ryan Holbrook all kinds of things.
Patients with fistfuls of material they found by searching the World Wide Web. New patients who were looking for the speciality he offers. And tons of questions.
“It’s good and it’s bad,” Holbrook says. “It keeps me more attuned to what’s new and what’s going on.”
He doesn’t have a Web site, but he still sees new patients who have discovered he’s in their back yard in the course of their wired wanderings.
“Some patients find out what the newest and latest treatments are and say, `Hey, who in my area does that,”’ Holbrook explains. They search until his name pops up.
Between 30 and 40 percent of Holbrook’s patients - often the younger ones - are using the Internet to get information about their illnesses and treatments. Holbrook favors this aspect of patients getting more actively involved in their own health care. And he doesn’t mind patients asking him questions about what they find or bringing a copy of the material for his opinion.
“People come in empowered with information and share it with you,” Holbrook says. “It can strengthen that (doctor-patient) relationship.”
But he worries about patients who don’t talk about what they find. And about what they do as a result of the material they find on the Web.
“I encourage them to call me,” he says. Holbrook says doctors need to know what alternative treatments patients are trying, because it may affect the treatments he and other physicians use.
It’s also important to know what a patient is thinking about a treatment. And to correct misinformation.
“There’s a lot of garbage on the Internet,” Holbrook says.
Recently, for example, there was a spate of stuff on how deodorant causes breast cancer.
“It’s completely ludicrous,” Holbrook says. But “people latch onto that.”
The rash of alternative medicine information is the most disturbing to Holbrook because it may unnecessarily deter patients from trying proven treatments.
“Everyone goes to a different health food store and gets a different story. It’s the same thing with the Internet,” he says.