Patients seek out web information

I found this idea in a recent book by David Wise, Ph.D. and Rodney Anderson, M.D.:

A patient who fails to receive an effective treatment from his doctor "goes to the internet to find avenues or advice to deal with this problem. This is now true for all medical conditions. The popularity of websites offering medical information is a testimony to this. The ability to search for alternative medical opinions and treatments on the internet represents a profoundly important change in medicine. The doctor has ceased to have the last word.

... It has been suggested that the webmaster may ultimately be more influential in medicine than the doctor by democratizing the exposure of different viewpoints that otherwise would not have been made available to patients."