The role of the health professional supporting consumers who use ‘Dr Google’

Google has become so synonymous with information search, retrieval and sharing that it entered our lexicon as the most-used verb to express searching information online. Consequently, few are surprised to learn that ‘googling’ applies as equally to health information seeking as it does to TV series spoilers or homemade slime recipes. Almost half the population uses what is now referred to as ‘Dr Google’ (Astrup, 2018), the use of the Google search engine to obtain information relating to health matters. Consumers are now also using this health information ‘superhighway’ to actively challenge their GPs on diagnosis, treatment, medications and referrals, with more than one in five of us doing so (Medical Protection, 2016). Ready access to such a wide range of information (Kraschnewski et al., 2014), in detail and often in laymen's terms equips the general public with information once considered the sole domain of medical practitioners and emboldens people to not only understand their health but also to participate in health discussions and decisions. What does the ‘empowered consumer’ (Herrmann-Werner et al., 2019) mean for front-line health staff and how do health staff determine whether consumers are indeed empowered and informed or overwhelmed and misinformed? If use of ‘Dr Google’ can alter the way consumers approach their own health care, do health staff need to be able to gauge the extent and veracity of this activity as part of overall patient assessment?