Introduction
Medical Internet resources can play an ambiguous role in making medical decisions, and this niche remains understudied. The impact of sites such as WebMD on the quality of medical practice should be assessed from a cause-effect perspective. There are several principles by which the use of Internet resources in medical practice functions. The primary role that these websites can play is supportive, that is, the websites are used to obtain information that will help make a diagnostic or therapeutic decision. If used in an overly trusting manner, web resources can cause varying degrees of medical error, damage the development of the medical practitioner, or distance the professional from giving patient-oriented care.
Insufficient Information
The problem with the effect of these websites on practice may be that the information from the Internet is not sufficiently studied by medical practitioners. Not only is it originally presented in an easily digestible form, it tends to simplify the decision-making process. In most cases, Internet resources concentrate on theoretical data, which are not sufficiently specific. Because of this, decision-making may not be fully applicable to the practical material of working with a single patient. Web resources can confuse a practitioner and influence their decisions based not on combining their own knowledge with a theoretical base, but strictly on what is written in web resources. The result of this may be the selection of the most general treatment, which will not fully meet the needs of the patient. Thus, regardless of the level of professionalism and quality of the original source, the information runs the risk of being simplified, which as a result will lead to an incorrect or incompletely meaningful decision.
Overabundance of Sources
Another problem in decision making can be the abundance of sources and the content of conflicting information. The inability to trust one particular resource due to the eclecticism of choice can confuse a practitioner and lead to an attempt to combine information from different sources. This is fraught with an incorrect decision-making that may have a negative or at least ambiguous effect on the patient’s treatment process. Moreover, such reliance on Web sources may distance the diagnostician from the actual professional evaluation of each patient. It may slow down the professional development of such specialists.
Excessive Focus on Automation
Web resources, if overly relied upon, can lead the practitioner away from the basic principles of medical care. A doctor making decisions based on web sources departs from two important principles of modern healthcare. Firstly, the use of web sources distances the specialist from the principles of evidence-based practice, which involves working with multiple data sources and carefully filtering information for its validity. The role of Internet resources in medical practice is valuable but can be unfairly overestimated and divert the practitioner from best practices to biased and insufficiently proven ones. Secondly, medical care should be patient-oriented, that is, proceed from the real needs of the patient, based on their autonomy.
Undoubtedly, in modern realities, automated resources are installed in almost every professional hospital, and often diagnostic processes can be automated. However, it is not difficult to imagine examples of how an excessive focus on automating the diagnosis can distance the physician from a sober assessment of the patient’s clinical picture. Automatic diagnosis, as my experience shows, removes the professional from interaction with the patient and forces one to proceed from imaginary objective information, rather than from the context around the individual patient or their actual needs.
Conclusion
The use of modern information retrieval technologies is only to be considered with caution. As an effect, excessive reliance on Internet resources, even if they are of high quality, can lead to a decrease in the professional competence of a medical specialist. The concentration on diagnostics purely through the Internet reduces the ability to apply critical thinking and consider the situation around each patient as an individual case. In this way, even the legitimately correct medical resources should be treated with particular Internet literacy, which can in perspective be taught as an additional course in the medical schooling.