Getting health advice from your doctor is fine and good, but you see your doctor only once or perhaps twice a year, and even then you are in her office for 20 minutes or so. And during those visits, you probably are busy discussing the reasons for your visit anyway. Often, the nuts and bolts of health are overlooked here. You trust your doctor and want her to help you out in any way possible, but when you need health help right away it is perfectly feasible to explore online health advice.
Getting health help online is as anonymous as you need it to be, meaning you could divulge as much or as little about yourself as you wish to any health professional offering this information online. So if your condition is perhaps embarrassing to you or you have questions that you hope your doctor never needs to know about, consider seeking health advice online rather than from your primary care physician. The advice probably is about the same if not exactly the same online as your doctor would give you.
Obtaining health help via the web is nothing new, since consumers for decades now have been tuning in to health specific websites to gain answers. Some sites unfortunately are less reliable than others, but increasingly there have become easier ways to tell which health help sites are good and which are hacks. For one thing, health help often is easily accessible from hospital systems and major health care providers. This health help normally is pretty accurate and reliable. Nonprofits with a vested interest in health care also offer great health help to better inform patients and consumers like you.
Searching through the various opportunities to gain health help is actually a fun process, since there are so many of these opportunities. Provided your condition or health concern is not an emergency and can wait to be addressed until further research is conducted, you could compare what two websites have to say about your questions and how they answer them. Just like getting a second or third opinion is common across the medical field in person, it is advisable online too. So explore at least two to three different websites that discuss your health concern or condition, so a more well rounded answer can be formed and a stronger health related decision can be made by you as a consumer.