When Doctors ‘Google’ Their Patients | Hacker News Reader

When Doctors ‘Google’ Their Patients

well.blogs.nytimes.com

14 pointsdak131 comments

Wait, I thought doctors were supposed to break into their patients' houses without permission in order to search for clues as to how they got sick!

This undermines everything I learned about medicine from the TV show, House.

In his 8 or 101 seasons, did he ever diagnosed anything wrong?

Yes, the 2-4 diagnoses he came up with in the first 35 minutes were always wrong. Only then did he get it always right.

This is horrible. mugshots.com is a fake website. It creates fake profiles based on queries it gets. So you enter in: First Name Last Name Drug. It will put a fake picture most likely based on last name. Meaning Ramirez isn't going to pull up a white dude. Gender is based on first name. drug or crime creates the context. It then creates several pages based on this. Then it relies on the person doing the search to apply bias. Throwing out information to make it fit your preconceived notion.

This is extremely dangerous and unbecoming of a doctor. What if the lady really had no idea. What if her son swapped out the sugar with cocaine in a panic and she OD on it.

Bottom line don't trust everything you read on the internet.

What's your source for this claim? I've read a little about the mugshot industry (yes, it is an industry) and how it works and I never read they were posting fake arrests/mugshots.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/business/mugged-by-a-mug-s...

This article and every one I have read has no mention about fake profiles, just scraping real arrests.

>Meaning Ramirez isn't going to pull up a white dude.

I randomly searched for Ramirez and got a white dude

http://mugshots.com/US-Counties/Texas/Comal-County-TX/Bobby-...

EDIT: I just tried to "create" several fake arrest records, and I was unable to, with many tries. I used last names from real arrests I knew (and verified) were in the database with first names that weren't.

Sorry, didn't check back to see if anyone replied to me until today. Source, My self. Unfortunately I don't think I can recreate my proof.

Around July 2013 the company I work for was looking for a new front desk person to handle payroll/AP/answer phones. Well the main boss was googling the top 4 people. One popped up as a criminal like 4 or 5 links down on google. He went around poking fun of her and her arrest recorded. At first I laughed. The next day I was thinking how did he get this info. I asked him and he said a simple google search.

I did the same search sure enough there she was. (mind you we have no idea how she is spouse to look) He dismissed her based on this alone. What really sucks. Something seemed off so I looked into. I was able to get the exact same picture to show up on several names and several charges. Started playing around with it and got pretty good at predicting the results. I know for 100% fact it was dynamically creating pages. I got pretty bored fairly quick. So I didn't note anything down as its not my main interest.

Why I think I can't recreate what I was seeing. It seems they have been getting in a lot of trouble as of late.

General article talking about it: http://www.project-disco.org/competition/101113-mugshot-mess...

Why Google should change search Algorithm: http://searchengineland.com/opinion-why-google-should-crack-...

Google changes search algorithm: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-mugshot-algorithm-17526.h...

Some articles talking about the ohio case: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/business/mugged-by-a-mug-s...

Its a removal service but links to all the sites: I'm sure one of them is the one I was talking about. If you want to spend time i'm sure you can reverse some of the sites algorithms and find something similar to what I was talking about. http://www.internetreputation.com/information/delete-your-mu...

and 19hours ago they WON! YAY!: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2014/01/07/Plaintiffs-win-set...

I realize am just some random dude on the Internet so I understand you can't just take my word for it, but there it is. Hopefully, its enough information to make you think I am not some kind of lair ;)

Wouldn't the doctor see that the mug shot doesn't look like their patient?

It also didn't match anything for me or a friend's name.

The article mentions that the result was a cocaine possession charge from when the patient was younger. I know I'm pretty terrible at matching child photos with their adult counterparts.

If you have a web presence of your own and run analytics software, it's probably easy to check if your doctor googled you. In fact, several times I've met with people who told me "I saw your site on the web before!" when I already know that they googled me last night and viewed three pages on my website. It's tempting to follow up with, "how do you like your Android tablet with 1920x1080 resolution running the Opera browser?"

One of my worst clients told me at our first meeting that he had viewed every single page on every website I ran, and he had this habit of starting off subsequent meetings by saying, "I reviewed every single page of the development site," etc. when the logs showed in each case that he had viewed at most three or four pages. It appeared that he was using every possible tactic to absolutely dominate any discussion or potential negotiation. I finally called his previous vendor and determined after a short discussion that the guy was a big liar, and helped him find a new vendor shortly thereafter.

Yes I would like Dr to be able to easily extract as much information so they can more accurately treat me. Most of time I'm just not good at describing what's wrong with me.

Doctors barely give you any time during an office visit, so I find it highly doubtful that they will want to waste more time searching online for someone.

As long as we're throwing anecdotes around, my doctor always gives me plenty of time; in fact, every once in awhile we just chat about personal things.

Correct. Studies show a large percentage of doctors don't even let patients finish their first sentence. As soon as a patient stopts talking to think and try to explain their problem, the doctor starts talking / asking questions. Source: Daniel H Pink, To Sell is Human.

Isn't this against some professional code they are bound by?

Not to my knowledge (this could vary greatly from one country to another).

They must not disclose private information concerning their patients, but this is precisely because they sometimes need to know very personal stuff in order to better treat and cure.

Doesn't disclosing it to a third party count?

Once again I am saved by having a ridiculously common name.

Should be illegal. Full stop. This "must know everything" nonsense is ridiculous.

You have a problem with your doctor googling you, possibly in order to know and cure you better while thousands of companies are crawling the net and harvesting this information for their profit?

If you leave sensitive personal data on the web, having your doctor finding it should be the last of your worries.

How is that illegal? Whatever is found in Google is public. It's like saying you are pirating books when you read them in library. I am not saying all the data that is indexed in Google is safe to use but that's your problem what you post on social networks and if sites you use have a crappy security/infrastructure.

Patients are, across the board, pretty rubbish at giving histories. They overlook things because they don't think it relevant or don't want to tell their doctors for some reason (even though itis relevant). This is especially true of drug and alcohol abusers.

I'm not sure most of those types of things would show up in a cursory search.

You may be underestimating the stuff people post on facebook these days.

You want to ban Google search?

A doctor should be allowed to go by what you tell them. Full stop. I may not want to tell someone about the fact I eat tons of red meat, for example. I may not want my test results to be shared with the insurance company, who will then charge me more. Too much shared information is dangerous.

A doctor already talks to family members when treating patients. Unless the patient has signed a release, the doctor can't talk back about the patient, their medical status, or history, but the family member is free to tell the doctor anything they want about the patient. This is especially good when the patient is very sick and doesn't know it, ie, mental illness. Or something along the lines of "he gets up every night and eats out of the refrigerator and he doesn't know he does it!" The family member who lives with the patient is sometimes better at observing symptoms that the patient misses. When I had a polysomnography (sleep study) done, there was a questionnaire specifically for the person who I shared a bed with, who observed me sleeping.

The family member might be able to tell the doctor a lot more about the patient then the doctor is able to get out of the patient. This has worked wonders in treating my dad, because he isn't able to really talk about his symptoms for whatever reason, he just can't describe them well, or doesn't think some of them are a problem that others are concerned about. My mom observes them, goes to the doctor with him, and tells the doctor what is going on with him.

>I may not want my test results to be shared with the insurance company, who will then charge me more.

That has nothing to do with this. If you don't want to share test results with insurance, then don't. Don't submit the claim to the insurance company, they don't pay for it, and nobody knows the results except you, the lab, and your doctor. If you want anyone else to know, you sign a release. That's how HIPPA works. This has nothing to do with doctors Googleing you.

> I may not want to tell someone about the fact I eat tons of red meat, for example.

So, you want your doctor to make decisions about your health based on lies and misinformation?

Trusting a doctor with stuff like your health, but not trusting them with information about what you eat, comes from a very obscure reasoning.

So don't put "I eat tons of red meat" on the web under your real name then..? I think you might be needlessly conflating the acts of googling someone's name and conducting a thorough investigation into them. Don't panic! :)

You don't want your doctor to have all the information they need to do their job?

This is a double-edge knife. Could help the doctor treat you better or could turn him against you in the sense that he will not be comfortable treating you anymore.

What is fascinating here is that probably most people have no idea how easily accessible their data is from everyone today.

Making anything widely adopted illegal is not a solution. Educating people to be more careful about what kind of info they share online, eponymously seems like a winner. What people don't seem to get is that the internet stays here for ever, for the good and bad.

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