Evaluating your health =/= reaching a diagnosis (or self-diagnosis). By all means, you should be conducting self-assessments and patients can absolutely diagnose/manage minor ailments. No one is suggesting you need to see a doctor for every ache, cold, fever or headache.

Part of our job in most patient encounters is providing education on when to escalate care/return for reassessment so you are clearly not expected to go to a doctor every other week.

What is dangerous is like in the rectal bleeding example I gave, one may Google their symptoms and “self-diagnose” hemorrhoids missing (consciously or subconsciously) that concurrent colon cancer is not uncommon (especially these days) and they should be seeing a doctor to assess their risk and plan further investigations.

This is a recent example that happened in a young physician whose delay in seeking care upstaged their cancer to stage IV.

> You are painting a very dogmatic, black-and-white picture that cannot include this kind of nuanced approach

Not really, I’m obviously speaking generally on a message board and not writing a position statement. I was also clearly talking in the context of potentially serious symptoms.

> Then of course my team reviews the code further.

This being the operative part of that. I would hope no one is pushing unreviewed commits to a production environment which is essentially what self-diagnosis is, except to your body.