Our advice: be wary of random Internet research during diagnosis and treatment

Vika: Yeah and I think another thing to think about is, you can Google this stuff, and you can also, you should also ask your health care professional, but if you Google things try to pick out the most credible Web sites. You know, don’t go for blogs or personal Web sites, but go for those that, you know, sponsored by American Cancer Society, at a credible university, you know credible sites, or a journal, or article, publisher, just look at all those things and determine for yourself if you think it’s valid for you. But going—it’s very dangerous going to personal Web sites of people who have had cancer and have had some experiences, and it’s also dangerous to look at the blogs and people complaining about the different things, because not all of those things are going to happen to you; they may or they may not, but a lot of times it’s the patient’s that are having very difficult times, or very easy times that like to share stories. So it’s good to get all angles but be careful on where you look.

Adam: Some of those sites have a little bit of a selection bias in that the patients that are having the worst experiences are the ones that are the most likely to write on them. So you can learn from those, but I think you can also maybe develop a negative outlook when one doesn’t necessarily have to be there. You can get a lot of misinformation from what you see on the internet. Everybody has a different story with cancer, even if you had the same cancer, and you think you might have had the same chemotherapy, you may not have had the same stage, or you may not have had the same cell type, or there have may have been some minute detail that made one person’s story completely different than another. So you can’t assume that the story that you’re reading on the internet, even though it sounds like it might be just like what happened to you, there may be some intricate details that are left out there that make all the difference.

Vika: And I remember at that time where I wanted all my questions answered, that’s where I looked. And it was kind of comforting to see all these stories, but then I would tell Adam, well this patient who had the same type of chemotherapy experienced hair loss within one month. Well it turned out my hair didn’t fall out completely until about four or five months. So, you know, right there, there was— everyone takes chemotherapy differently, everyone reacts differently. So, it’s really important to just be open like we said before and just take it as it comes.