Every time his doctor prescribes him medication, Bollywood music composer Ajay Singha makes sure he looks it up on Google. “When I can’t understand a medical term in my blood report, I find a surprisingly lucid explanation for it on Google,” laughs the Mumbai-based Singha.

Tackling doctors was never this easy. For scores of years, medicos in India were treated like gods; you didn’t question them. The grim, bespectacled doctor in Hindi cinema underlined the patient-medico relationship. “I’m sorry,” was all the doctor said when the patient died on the operating table.

These days, patients don’t care when doctors are reticent — they have Internet search engines to explain every medical term.

“If we can look for cameras online, why can’t we double check the doctor’s advice online,” asks Sushmita Nair, a media professional in Mumbai. Nair last looked up the Net a few weeks ago to check if her husband’s gall stone surgery, as advised by their doctor, was really necessary.

Not surprisingly, the doctor-patient relationship is changing. “Till 25 years ago, the relationship was a paternalistic one,” says Dr Arshad Ghulam Mohammed, a Mumbai-based surgeon who specialises in abdominal surgery. “Patients didn’t ask questions.”

Now, they don’t just ask questions — they even argue about diagnosis or medication. And while most doctors appreciate a patient who does his research, the downside is that many of these websites have information which is obsolete or even misleading.

To top it, as Dr Ghulam Mohammed points out, the written matter cannot replace the medical acumen and wisdom that come with practice. “A doctor spends at least 10 years before achieving a certain level of medical expertise,” he stresses.

But it now seems doctors and patients are gearing up for battle, thanks to the Internet. Doctors don’t want patients to question them with half-baked knowledge, and patients are tired of doctors who don’t clearly explain an ailment. “I will continue to do my own reading instead of simply taking their word as the gospel truth,” says Singha.

Both sides have valid arguments. Patients often complain that few doctors discuss the side effects of medicines or other complications thoroughly. Arunima Roy (name changed) discovered that the hard way when her mother was put on a course of antibiotics. “She started hallucinating at night, hearing sounds of people quarrelling,” Roy recounts.

The next day, the doctor was informed — and he promptly changed the medicines, without explaining the matter to Roy. She did a Google check later, and found that hallucination was one of the side effects of the medicine that had been prescribed earlier.

“As far as basic information goes, the Internet is a library at one’s fingertips,” says Pratap Mukhopadhyay, chief executive officer, geneOm Biotech, Pune. “But it cannot give a customised medical view,” adds Mukhopadhyay, who sees several patients with cancer or HIV undergoing genetic testing, which guides the doctor in prescribing treatment suited to the individual.

Doctors maintain that websites are often alarmist — and tend to present the worst-case scenarios. “No matter how mild your condition — it can even be a headache — a medical website will invariably list cancer as one of its causes,” says Mumbai-based human rights lawyer Mihir Desai, who also admits to looking up the Internet for health-related queries.

Dr Ghulam Mohammed has seen a lot of that. “Patients end up getting frightened and imagine the worst. Often we have patients coming with a simple case of amoebiosis, imaging that he or she has cancer,” he says.

What Internet research also leads to is a battery of unnecessary tests, the medicos complain. Doctors are often pressurised by patients into recommending tests. And while suing doctors is not yet a trend in India, as it is in many parts of the West, doctors cautiously go along with the patients’ demands. “After all, medicine is a very uncertain science and not precise like mathematics. We practise defensive medicine for fear of litigation,” Dr Ghulam Mohammed adds.

What’s worse is that the information on the Internet is not always correct.

“A lot of anecdotal accounts from other patients could be wrong, perverse and confusing,” warns Dr Nikhil Datar, a Mumbai-based gynaecologist. “While researching their condition online empowers the patient and improves the doctor-patient partnership, patients can end up getting a lot of information that is not necessarily knowledge,” he holds.

On the other hand, while a doctor has limited time, a patient has unlimited access to the Internet. Some blogs also help patients or their families. A musician who does not want to be named says he found solace in the pregnancy-related blogs he’d visited to check if his wife’s intense discomfort in the first trimester of pregnancy was normal.

But patients, doctors warn, should log on to the right sites. Dr Datar, for instance, guides his patients to websites of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (www.acog.org) or the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (www.rcog.org.uk) for the right kind of information.

Apart from the spread of the Internet, one of the reasons patients are logging on to find answers to their medical questions is that doctors are too busy these days. The days of the family physician who spent hours with the patient are long gone. Doctors — in government hospitals as well as private ones — don’t have the time to clear every doubt that a patient has. And thanks to the growing awareness of health issues, patients have more queries than their counterparts did a generation ago.

So if patients are increasingly rushing to the Internet, it is only partly due to their distrust in the doctor, says lawyer Desai. “Though if a doctor made time to explain matters to the patient, this desire would be less — but would be there all the same,” he adds.

The way out, says Jehangir Gai, a consumer activist in Mumbai, is for patients to consult a not-so-well-known doctor who can answer their questions satisfactorily than a famous doctor who has no time and gets his juniors to treat them.

“But sometimes it is patients who don’t have the time or don’t want to take the extra advice that a doctor has to give,” says Dr Birendra Yadav, a general practitioner in Navi Mumbai.

Not everybody, of course, is in search of instant answers on the Internet. “Instead of consulting medical websites, I would rather put my trust in a good, honest doctor, who is interested in serving the poor and represents God,” says P.C. Singhi, a retired IAS officer of the Rajasthan cadre, who has been fighting a medico-legal case against a Mumbai oncologist since 1988.

Dr Ghulam Mohammed has the last word: “Do your research, but at the end of the day, please listen to your doctor.” Net gain, after all, can sometimes be a total loss.