Look It Up!: What Patients, Doctors, Nurses, and Pharmacists Need to Know about the Internet and Primary Health Care

Doctors Pierre Pluye and Roland Grad, internationally recognized experts in the fields of knowledge translation and health information studies, along with bestselling author and journalist Julie Barlow, take readers behind the scenes to show how online information is affecting self-care and primary health care in medicine, nursing, and pharmacy. Based on fifteen years of in-depth interviews and research, Look It Up! provides essential tips for patients and clinicians to administer and receive the best possible primary health care, while avoiding the perils of unguided self-diagnosis. This book shows how, by dint of an inquiring mind and a smartphone, rapid and accurate acquisition of knowledge keeps primary care clinicians up to date. It also shows how people can determine whether a test is more beneficial than harmful, and how information helps resolve disagreements and improve collaboration with patients and families, and among doctors, pharmacists, and nurses. In the age of easily accessible online information, clinicians have to think differently about how they work. Organized around numerous real clinical stories, Look It Up! is an illuminating and lively guide to improving patient care.