[k-mcgrady]

>> "I've never seen a doctor research anything either"

I have. It's terrifying. I recently went to the GP, told them my condition (which had been diagnosed by a different GP) and their first response was to look it up on Wikipedia. Seriously. I understand that a GP isn't going to know every condition you come in with but Wikipedia as the reference material?

[vacri]

It shouldn't be terrifying at all. GPs are not specialists. And even specialists don't know everything. I used to work as a neuro tech and I remember a patient came in announcing that he had some particular syndrome (I can't recall the name). I stayed quiet about it, never having heard it, but needed to get a neurologist in for the test anyway. In comes the specialist, one whose skill I greatly respected, and the patient proudly announces the syndrome. The neurologist had no qualms about directly asking what that was. The thing is, if your syndrome only has five people in the country that are affected by it, it's not reasonable to expect every doctor (even specialist) to know what it is off the top of their head. There are hundreds of thousands of maladies that can affect the human body. Many of them go by multiple names.

To top this all off, a GP is a General Practitioner. Their main role is to filter out the sniffles and the rashes, and keep an eye out for the more serious stuff, which gets passed on to an appropriate specialist. In the GP's case, going to Wikipedia gives a good, quick baseline on what the disease is. A GP shouldn't be prescribing drugs from WP, but if you say you've got McGrady's Syndrome, the GP looks it up quickly on WP (which is a very quick, concise resource), and finds out it's a liver problem of a certain type, the GP now has a base to work with. Liver problems mean X, Y, or Z in general, start looking at those avenues of inquiry.

The other thing is that while it should not be a canonical reference, when it comes to scientific topics, WP is very well written, concise, and quick to access. If you've ever used medical software, you'd know the high variety of quality there is - some is just plain awful when it comes to looking things up. And textbooks by their very nature go out of date.

[DanBC]

Being charitable the GP wanted to know what misinformation the patients come in with.

Being realistic: yes, it's terrifying. GPs are subject to the same biases and prejudices as everyone else.

[ArkyBeagle]

You can always tell the premeds as an undergrad - they are the ones who ask "will this be on the test?"