That is in stark contrast to search terms correlated with the harder parts of the country, several of which are related to healthcare.
The top five searches where life is the hardest include:
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- free diabetic
- antichrist
- 38 revolver
- ways to lower blood pressure
- diabetic diet
Three of the top five relate to healthcare. Overall, roughly 30 of the 90 terms in “hard” areas relate to medical conditions, treatments and diets. Several are what physicians would consider basic health questions, like what is normal blood sugar. There are also searches for the symptoms of lupus, natural ways to lower blood pressure, sinus cavities and low- calorie or carbohydrate diets. Some are more disturbing than others, such as free medicine.
The big takeaway from the Times analysis is the difference in thoughts that occupy advantaged and disadvantaged populations. But if you work in healthcare, and if your organization is looking to help improve the health of your surrounding population, this analysis is a detailed, painful reminder of healthcare’s haves and have-nots.
These search results don’t tell us everything, but they tell us a whole lot, and in a rugged way. People who live in hard areas, as defined by socioeconomic and health outcomes, are concerned about their health. I’m sure people in easy areas are too, but why were virtually 0 of their 90 top search terms about medical procedures or conditions? Was it a difference in insurance coverage, their ability to see a physician? (I’m curious to see if there might be any shift in search terms if we changed the timetable to the past year, as more Americans gained coverage under the healthcare reform law.)
Providers often ask how they can measure whether they’ve improved the health of a population, and maybe one wonky way to do that is by closing the gap between the two Americas, defined in this case as the people who go to Google for healthcare versus those who go to a physician or other healthcare provider, or are healthy enough to not search conditions on the web. How can we use these search results to improve health literacy? How can we better inform people in these counties of the viable, safe healthcare options available to them?
The list of problems in American healthcare is a long one, and I’ve written about many of these deficiencies. But I keep coming back to idea of a man or woman in a neighborhood deemed hard to live, sitting at a computer and Googling “free medicine.” Something about that is especially hard to take. It’s even harder to wonder what he or she did with the results.
