Should Doctors Google Their Patients?
By now, it’s well known that almost anyone you meet — from a potential employer to a prospective date — might be searching for information about you online. But would you feel strange knowing that your doctor was Googling you?
The practice appears to be widespread, according to an essay in the latest edition of the Harvard Review of Psychiatry, and it raises some thorny ethical questions for doctors, particularly those dealing with mental health.
In some cases, what the authors call “patient-targeted Googling” is clearly beneficial — for example, when a patient is blogging about her suicidal thinking, or when an unconscious person comes into an emergency room with scant identification. But in other cases, the authors write, doctors are motivated by “curiosity, voyeurism and habit.”
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