Yeah, I believe your experience, and I think it highlights the issues we have with communication in medicine. While it may look like your doctor is just blindly Googling something, I would imagine they're probably using it as more of a reference source (at least that's what I often do). I regularly use radiopaedia.org just to look up a quick fact or find alternative examples of a diagnosis I'm working with.

It's like Googling coding questions and reading a StackOverflow thread. Obviously no programmer is solely relying on StackOverflow to do their job as no physician is solely relying on Google, UpToDate, or any other resource. They're simply quick references.

> Obviously no programmer is solely relying on StackOverflow to do their job

I've encountered a few people who were doing something very close to this. I really hope that doesn't happen in medicine too.

That's down to the (obvious) fact that job performance and working ethics is not equal but distributed among practitioners.

I think this is especially visible in software "engineering" with people joining the craft after a few weeks of boot camp. (think engineering vs programming)

However, we put doctors through an especially rigorous and long training and certification process to minimize the amount of unqualified practitioners.

Doctors are supposed to have a higher entry barrier than software developers. Does not mean that all of them are brilliant, of course.

Having software to show differential diagnoses, or using Google images because you know to search for, are not the smoking guns you think they are.