WACO, Texas — Generation Z, or Gen-Z for short, are looking for medical advice from their friends, family and even social media before actually seeing a doctor. Medical professionals weigh-in on this growing trend.
- Medical professionals have seen a spike in the younger generation seeking medical advice from their family, peers, and social media.
- 38% of this generation head to social media as their first source of a diagnosis.
- Dr. Melanie Raffoul has worked with Baylor Scott and White's digital team to create an help with the help of AI to help bridge the doctor-patient relationship
- You can download the My BSW Health Apphere.
BROADCAST TRANSCRIPT
When it comes to going to the doctor, Generation Z, or Gen-Zers for short, start down different avenues before heading straight to a medical professional.
“Right now, I would say I go to social media or look it up because my insurance is in California and it’s a little bit harder because you have to move insurance providers for Texas, so I usually get checkups when I go home, but other than that if I need a doctor, I’m going to look something up before I need a doctor for sure,” Clay Brandt said, Senior at Baylor University.
38% are heading to social media for a diagnosis first- but is that really the right move to make?
“It can be innocuous, and it can be very dangerous. There's a pretty wide spectrum of what can occur after interacting with social media or just general online searches and queries to try to solve your problems,” Trevin Rube said, Nurse Practitioner at Heart of Texas Primary Care in Waco.
Nurse Practitioner Trevin Rube is with Heart of Texas Primary Care in Waco.
He has 15 years of experience and says he's seeing more and more doctors taking a back seat.
“It does feel that I have patients coming to me when they do come into the office mentioning these uh online search endeavors that they've undertaken prior to coming in at an increasing rate, but I, I have no data to be able to say that it absolutely is happening more often, but it certainly feels like it is,” Rube said.
“It’s dangerous because you need to know what to do next, and it needs to be from a source that you trust,” said Dr. Melanie Raffoul, Fellow at the American Academy of Family Physicians.
Melanie Raffoul, says the reason Gen-Zers are resorting to other avenues: they’re missing the trusting relationship between patient and doctor.
“I think we're seeing it because it can be very hard to navigate health care. It can be very hard very hard to find a provider. What about my insurance? How much does this cost? Oh my goodness, they're only open during business hours. So I think that relationship is also getting more challenging to kind of cultivate and curate,and that's something that in the medical community we are evolving to try to bridge that gap,” she said.
And it’s evolving in a big way. Dr. Raffoul has helped create a way to decide if you need to go to a doctor or not and where to go through the digital space.
“It's here to kind of get some information. It's not here to diagnose you. So what our app does, if you download my BSW Health and you look under Get Care Now and you tick on Help Me Decide, you can start having a conversation. The first leg of this conversation is geared towards what you, what are you experiencing, what your symptoms are, and you're having that conversation with an AI chat bot,” she concluded.
