Vol , Issue Date of Publication: October 23, 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.20529/IJME.2025.079

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Dr Google v Dr Real: Is it unethical to dismiss patients who self-diagnose?

Vangipuram Harshil Sai
Chiramana Haritha
Vangipuram Shankar
Abstract:

With online information at their fingertips, patients increasingly present with self-diagnoses — a trend that both empowers and complicates care. Many clinicians react with dismissal, seeing such behaviour as a challenge to their expertise. But is it ethical to disregard patients who Google their symptoms? Through a case vignette and analysis grounded in autonomy, epistemic justice, and beneficence, we argue that dismissal reflects a deeper failure of ethical engagement. Medical education must evolve to equip future doctors with humility and communication skills to guide, not guard, patients in an information-saturated world.


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©Indian Journal of Medical Ethics 2025: Open Access and Distributed under the Creative Commons license ( CC BY-NC-ND 4.0),
which permits only non-commercial and non-modified sharing in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

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