First Experience With WebMD

I’ve got either a very mild case of the flu or a very mild cold, I’m not sure which. My wife decided to play around with WebMD and plug in my symptoms. After an extremely long series of symptom questions, I’ve come to the conclusion that WebMD might want to modify their questions to include symptom duration. It’s either that or my wife was using it wrong.

Mind you, answering the questions was difficult enough as it was. Some symptoms I could say definitely, but some were not just yes/no questions. For example, when they asked about difficultly breathing through the nose, did they mean entirely or any little bit? My airway is open, but it feels a bit restricted. Same thing with runny nose. Does the fact I’ve had one at all mean ‘yes,’ or should I say ‘no’ since it was only occasionally and not very often at that?

However, one thing they didn’t ask was duration of symptoms. At the end of everything, my top two potentials were cold and flu. Wow, so helpful is the WebMD. More interesting were the other two possibilities they mentioned: arthritis and gout.

What? Arthritis and gout? Shouldn’t the fact that the symptoms started less than a week ago tend to lead away from these two conclusions? Given how important symptom duration would be to distinguishing between cold/flu and arthritis/gout, shouldn’t they have asked? It just seemed a bit ridiculous.

Frankly, I can see how they end up panicking people if they don’t have enough additional question data built-in to screen arthritis/gout out from cold/flu. I know I either have a mild cold or a mild flu, and they weren’t helpful on that. I am certain I don’t have arthritis or gout and WebMD was just being ridiculous on that aspect.

Bottom line, I don’t think WebMD is particularly useful unless you are a hypochondriac looking for strange things to think about your medical state.

Of course, if I’d been really concerned about whether I had a mild cold or a mild flu, I probably would have gone to a real doctor. WebMD in my view is more for my wife to play with by trying to enter wild imaginary symptoms to attempt to arrive at a weird diagnosis. She was having a lot of fun with the fact that once she entered ‘bleeding nipples’ and ended up with a diagnosis of muscle strain.