Unzipping Taboos: Candid Conversations about Sex - When You Don’t Have a Dr. Sue: Googling Your Way Through Sex & Health

Episode Date: August 27, 2025

What do you do when you don’t have access to someone like Dr. Sue? For many people, the answer is: Dr. Google.In this episode, we’re unzipping the pros and cons of turning to online searches, AI tools, and social media for answers to sex and health questions. We unzip why people turn to the internet—often out of necessity—and how it can be both empowering and problematic. We talk about the convenience, anonymity, and access online platforms can offer, especially for those without trusted providers or inclusive care. But we also explore the risks: misinformation, shame-driven algorithms, biased sources, and search results shaped by politics and profit.From privacy concerns and symptom checkers, to Reddit rabbit holes and the need for critical thinking, this conversation is for anyone who’s ever typed a vulnerable question into a search bar and hoped for something close to the truth.Because sometimes the internet is the best option—and we think you deserve better than a vague blog post or sponsored ad.If you have a story, thoughts and/or a topic or question for Dr. Sue and Charlie please share your ideas here:  ⁠Show suggestionsIf you want to ask Dr Sue a sex question for the weekly Q&A you can submit it here: Ask a question

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Unzipping Taboos, candid conversations about sex. We are Dr. Sue and Charlie, and we're here to have the kinds of real unfiltered conversations about sex, sexuality, and relationships that most people are too afraid or too embarrassed to start. No shame, no judgment, just honest talk. So zip down, zip down and let's get candid. And everyone, did you know you can watch us now too? That's right. We have started doing releasing video with our episodes. For our listeners that have been on this journey with us. You know that this started with our 50th episode, and here we are. So you will be able to see what it looks like when Dr. Sue raises an eyebrow, or I cringe laugh mid myth busting.

You get to see all the and more importantly, you can see the air quotes now. You'll find us wherever you stream your podcast. And so and now you can watch us on Spotify or YouTube. Today, we are going to dive into what you do when you don't have a Dr. Sue at your immediate on-demand disposal. Before we do that, specifically, actually, let me back up, specifically focusing on what we're calling Dr. Google. But before we do that, hey, Dr. Sue. Hey, Charlie. How are you? I'm all right. I'm a little weird about the camera I'm not gonna lie like yeah um well through that weirdness that maybe internal feeling of awkwardness being on video now um would you like to give our listeners a little bit about your

background I feel like I don't because I feel like I get yelled at whenever I do this so it's awkward enough can we just skip this part I guess therein lies the problem yeah yeah um so let's see if i can do it so those of you have no idea what the joke is i i get uh spoken to yelled at by some of my you get encouraged i get yelled at uh encouraged by folks who know me in the real world who are like you're not spending enough time my intro i'm like that's not why people are listening um but i guess an intro must happen so here's the intro um i have a phd in human sexuality i am let's see i have so many hats um by day super super here by day now um i am uh i work in academia by day but it is really important to me that i'm not just working in academia so i

work in academia by day teaching all the peoples the things um and then i also am hey dr c on social media and so folks submit anonymous questions to me anonymous sex questions and relationships and all sorts of sex adjacent questions all those taboo topics in between and all those taboo topics in between um and every sunday i answer them on all the social medias we'll put a link in the description if you want to submit a question to me but to make sure i highlight the things so i have the phd in human sexuality i'm a master certified health education specialist i'm certified in public health i've written a tech co-written a textbook i've spoken all over nationally internationally locally I think see was that better on the

I could just feel the judgment all right so not for me but that's enough about me though I'm sure you're going to hear especially in this episode I'm sure you're going to hear a lot more about kind of background and stuff like that but before we get into that for those of you who do and don't know Charlie Charlie is our curious co-host who's always ready to talk about all those things that taboo sex adjacent sex relationships all those things that we so rarely talk about um at least not openly so do you want to tell us some more about you sure um i'm charlie dr sue and i have been friends for many years and uh from the beginning of our friendship we found that we very easily had unfiltered candid conversations about all sorts of topics and um i think that

stemmed from getting the sense that we both enjoy challenging what's expected of us, especially as women in society and questioning what we're conditioned to believe our role is and what society also puts on other people and how they're supposed to interact in this world. And then I just have a general kind of amateur fascination with the psychology of humanity and how we're all trying to navigate through this life this lifetime this earthly presence um and coexist together um and some of that just mean means challenging challenging what what we're told what we're expected to do what we're supposed to feel shame about what we um all of those things so all the things all the things so that's me that's charlie in a nutshell how did i get in

this crazy nutshell um if you know you know so dr google dr sue would you like to talk a little bit about your colleague dr google because we're buddies dr google and i are friends um can we do a little bit first about how we kind of got to this episode absolutely and I want to make sure that I anyone who's listening who I may be talking about realizes I'm probably not talking about you um the last two months and I don't know why I seem to have been getting a lot more of these questions from friends um questions from people who are close to me I mean people have always asked me questions I just feel like in the last two months it's been a lot more of um it's more like aunt sue like my my friends will call me you know not blood related but my friends

will call me and they'll be like can aunt sue ask her answer a question i'm like okay so there's a sex issue uh and as long as their child is okay with it because i'm sure that's a little weird most of most of my friends kids don't know what i do like i'm an adult who cares about what i do so as long as it's okay with the kid like i'm happy to do it and i just feel like in the last two months I've gotten a lot more of those by phone by text in person um and not just kids like I've had people ask me questions on their own um about their lives and what they're going through and so it's just it's just been a lot and I'm always happy to answer those questions as long as they don't make the situation weird like I never want to answer someone's next question

that's the end of our friendship because they've now like told me too many things yeah so the big joke is like i'm aunt sue to anyone who has a sex question but i am also dr sue to the rest of the world and so we were having a conversation about this because it was like three or four in a week when we first started talking you and i started talking about possible topics and i was like what do what do these people do like what would these people do if they didn't know me where you know where would they go and your answer was obviously was the obvious answer of dr google dr google and so we realized that we should probably have a conversation about what happens when you don't have your own doctor see you on speed dial though you do have access to me but i am at this point

three and a half months backed up on answering questions so submit a question if you've got it just i hope it's not timely because i am backed up which is good that people are reaching out but bad that people aren't finding quicker answers I think but anyway yeah so so when people don't have their own doctor see or someone else they can talk to I mean you may have someone in your life you feel like you can have conversations with um but most of the time we're gonna go to google and I don't think it's a bad thing necessarily as long as we know what we're getting into the limitations right yeah um i very recently i was talking to you about this before the show i very recently had a friend um who was telling me that a parent was having a health issue

not a health issue i knew it wasn't a sex it wasn't a sex thing and i'm not an md um but i wanted to kind of get an idea of like how freaked out should we be so i just kind of googled like when this happens how often is it like i don't think i wrote that how often do people die i don't think that's my problem I've done that right yeah well it's gonna tell you you're gonna die anyway what are the odds yeah um you know just to get a general idea of like how how upset should we be or how worried should we be and I got an answer and I I know better than to trust the internet just at the internet but the information I got was probably in the ballpark of what I was looking for it was saying majority of this was it 75 80 i don't really care um there have been

times where i've put in like is someone gonna die and it's like yeah pretty much so i mean we do that all of us do it and it doesn't mean that you're lazy it doesn't mean that you're um that you're not willing to go to a legitimate resource i don't know if that echo just reverbed in the no I didn't hear it smacked it um so I think a lot of times when we're like oh you're looking it up on google like that's a bad thing that's a I I think that that's a legitimate option for people who don't have someone they can call quickly or whether it's me or another doctor in your life or your your real you know health care team I think that getting online and looking for answers is is a human experience and I really wish we'd kind of stop judging people for doing

that. Agreed. Because there's a piece of it where you're just trying to temper any immediate, depending on how anxious of a person you are and how your internal thoughts can perhaps run away. Doing this is one way of coping and trying to mitigate some of that in some way. I think the important thing to remember to your point just a moment ago is that there's going to be a wealth of information. And then there is a whole hundred layers of why you saw the search results that you saw. And that's not like a judgment statement. It's just how the internet works. It's how all of our devices work. It's reading our interactions to build an experience for us when we go to these different tools. So remember that when you are searching, there are things in the search results

that may be because of the current, if there's a current moral panic, you know, then it's gonna surface some things above the fold, as I like to say, for you newspaper readers out there. That's old school folk. It is. But it could be like vinyl, it could be making a comeback. um so you're gonna see certain things based off of what's happening in the world what you've what you've searched or interacted with on the internet before and and just a variety of things there's a it's also gonna be partly informed by just kind of certain biases like you know cis hetero that's that's gonna be the baseline for

a lot of the information that pops up and so it's just be mindful absolutely because i think the other thing that um that it helps with is finding language yes especially because we don't ever give people the prop we very rarely give people the proper language to have some of the questions that they want to have yeah but i want to go back i want to i want to do both things yeah okay let's So let's take a couple steps back before we get into finding the language. Because when we're talking about Google, like we're all assuming that you're using a search engine. We use Google just as an adjective. But then, and I've had some of my students have said this, like, well, I use AI.

So that information is more reliable. And I'm always like, oh, no. AI is only as good as the information that was fed to it. And it's only as updated as the system has been updated. And I know at one point, I want to say like two years ago, chat GPT hadn't been updated in two years prior. And there was there was a point in time and some of you may remember this. There was a point in time where Siri would not give you information about abortion if you asked her. like boom used to be like hey siri tell me now it's i don't know who we're talking to okay google i don't know who we talk to anymore and i remember doing that in my class this must have been like eight nine years ago where where we would ask where can you go for the closest abortion and

those who are using non-apple products were getting information and for those who are asking siri they actually weren't getting information on local clinics and so when you're using any kind of ai there may be limitations like i'd love right now to do a search i mean i can't do it on my history because of the work that i do i feel like it's already going to get through but like if i were to search for where can i get reproductive health care and to ask someone who's in a much more restrictive state than i am i don't know if the i don't know if google would make a difference i do think that if they just ask their phone or they got that it would be different um but theoretically theoretically chat gpt shouldn't be location-based yeah theoretically right but we know this we

talked about this a little bit in the porn episode that in states where in states where you have to prove that you're a certain age like there will be a you can't you know we know your your your ip is coming from this state we saw that a lot with porn hub who was like screw you if you're going to do this we're not going to be in your state and so it does have something about your location i don't understand the ins and outs of this stuff folks like so I just want you if you're like well what does the IP address say I have no idea yeah but it's like this isn't available in your state right now so we can limit information or excessive or access based on your state I don't know why anyone is surprised that it's also filtering information yeah it's throttling right again again depending

on how you're trying to get to this information that all of all i think almost all of the resources that we turn to are privately owned probably yeah so they're they're corporations their motive is revenue and and being as non-regulated as possible in certain ways but there's that look that if If you're watching this, you never got to see it before. That's a different episode and a different platform. Let's back up a little bit. Well, hold on. This isn't new.

And you need to point this out because when you take a look at textbooks, having worked K through 12 and having worked around the country, the majority of textbooks K through 12 are published in Texas. And so if Texas doesn't want to put something in there, it's going to impact the entire country. This is not, because a lot of times people are like, oh, technology, this is another reason we should hate technology. It's not the technology itself. We have been doing this. Going back to what you said about above the fold, oh, people don't read these days. There are people who would never flip over to the other side of the paper or wouldn't go past like A5. So this idea of getting as quick information and that our information may be being controlled is not new.

No. So this isn't a tech issue. And I want to make sure we're pointing that out. But you were going to go somewhere different. That's no, that's, that's an important caveat, I think, to point out. So I want to back up a little bit and talk about why people would turn to a Dr. Google, why they don't feel comfortable, perhaps reaching out immediately to their healthcare provider to talk about sex related concerns, issues, sex, health issues, etc. What what are your thoughts on that? I mean, right now, considering everything that's happening in the news, and I know that we're a couple of weeks, we're filming this a couple of weeks before it's going to be released. But there's a lot right now about women and abortion and pregnant women who aren't married. And so I think for some people, there's a fear of reaching out. For some women, let's be really honest, it's women right now. I think for some women, there is a concern that if I put this down, if I say to my doctor, I am struggling with this and I'm pregnant and then I miscarry, that that will actually

be used against me because we're seeing that happen. For some folks who may be non-binary or who may be trans, they may be afraid of putting into a patient portal information that can be used to track them. And I think that is a legitimate fear right now. so i think part of it might be the condemnation that may come with the information that we share that's a very heavy side of this but i wanted to i wanted to i can't i think it's it's it's incredibly important to point out right but let's move past that because yeah let's go back to the habit that existed before our current political climate and dr google and this isn't just a

women's issue i don't want people thinking that it's just women who who do this because they're afraid of the impact from whoever um part of it may be a language thing like i don't know what that body part's called so how do i even like send a message in the patient portal like i when i call and try to make an appointment like if i just tell them it hurts down there is that going to make sense to them and so i think part of it going back to what you had said was the language issue i think part of it's an immediacy thing condom just broke what do i do i am not sending a message in the patient portal if i am 18 i may not even know if i'm 16 how to get into a patient portal right you know that that may be your parent to give you the password and right parents and

guardians are kind of doing that thing yeah um but for some of it's the immediacy of this just happened and i don't want to wait until business opens you know it's midnight i was out i got you know i was having sex the condom broke i don't want to wait till business hours to call someone to get an answer yeah so for some of it it's the immediacy um for some of it's the language for some of it's the embarrassment we've talked in another episode about how you can become a doctor in this country and never really take a class in human sexuality and i want to clarify that because people are like oh but they learn the body parts human sexuality is more than just body parts it's more than anatomy it's more than anatomy it's about understanding how humans function

it's about sex drives it's about understanding a whole person it's about gender and orientation and it's about learning those things that help you have those conversations so yes they may be learning anatomy they also may not be learning all the anatomy um but when i say that you don't have to take human sexuality class it's it's all those other things that that's so often get overlooked and so if i've tried to talk to my doctor before doctors put me on a new medication my sex drive tanked which happens with a lot of medication if my my doctors never asked me about that I I don't know if I feel safe talking now about that right or if it's just like you know check the box like oh do you have any side effects are they sexual okay you know like if they're just

running through a checklist there's no room for dialogue I don't know if I'm going to feel safe talking to you about some of that or that you're going to be understanding um so I think I think there's some shame especially when it especially when it feels like it's reflecting on you I can't get wet I can't get an erection that may feel like embarrassing yeah um I think that looking online is going to give you that quicker response and feel safer depending on what you find though right so that's the other part of the problem but I yeah I don't know if you want to jump in yeah i just to to add to the idea of that there it's it's likely shame part shame um depending on the issue that you have an immediate need for information on there could be

i mean look we're we're in america there's a ton of stigma around stis around sex around pleasure around pregnancy, around women having sex and pleasure and men and their performance and their, I don't know, sexual acumen, perhaps. So there's stigma, I think, contributes to perhaps some of that shame. You could just feel awkward and you don't want to say the things out loud yet. yeah and if you've never dealt with a doctor around something that personal because it's a difference between like your blood pressure hot is high and my penis isn't working the way it's supposed to or i'm not getting wet or i don't feel like i'm having desire or yeah there's something drippy coming out of my genitals like there's a difference between okay so here's your height

weight charge here's your high blood pressure like there's a difference between those and if I've never had that opportunity to have that conversation it is safer to turn to Dr. Google and get something good information yeah and I want to talk about the accuracy of that um yeah that's where I wanted to go to okay cool because I can't find my pen right yeah I found it um but but I think that it feels a little safer because I don't have to worry about your reaction and so especially if we've never had that interaction with that particular health care worker i don't i don't know what you're gonna say um and so if i can just kind of find the answers on my own and if you haven't already listened to the last episode i think we did without video

that was the man one right the man that was men's health men's health yeah yeah man one men's health part one we part two part part two uh for those of you who remember the movie reference i'm doing there um that will be coming soon but one of the things we talked about was the vulnerability issue that if you're a man you're not supposed to be vulnerable and saying i'm in pain i don't know this hurts this doesn't feel right this isn't working right that there's a whole lot of vulnerability that i'm not going to get if i go into an incognito window and yeah and search for it i think the other part too that um is this anticipation of judgment from your health care provider especially if you if you're a child like you this has been your doctor

all your life and you're not quite 26 yet so you don't have your own provider you're still with your parents health care um good on you you know make sure you keep that insurance as long as you can um but you're not you know depending on what that relationship is and how unfiltered your doctor may be with your parents, etc. You know, there's, there's a whole host of things. And then on top of that, you may have a sense that your healthcare provider is not particularly I'm going to use the phrase that we hate, but I think it captures it sex positive. I know. In this case, because sex freedom would have sounded out of context, which is the phrase that we do endorse um but that they aren't that that they may shame have a language of inherent

or implicit shame when you're coming to them with these questions they might not explicitly say oh my god why would you whore around like that why would you slut you know what are you out there just being a little hussy you know that that could be a reaction that you get or i'm a pediatrician i don't have to deal with this right this isn't this isn't what i want i want to deal with babies and you know yeah infant toddler issue is not you think you want to become sexually active and you're trying to take you're trying to make good decisions like there are definitely pediatricians who don't like treating older end spectrum and sorry older end of the spectrum kids at age range i wanted to finish that sentence before i cut myself off uh but especially like you said if

they've been your pediatrician and you haven't you know maybe they're not really thrilled about working with especially older teenagers but you've always been there and you haven't made the transition it's gonna feel a little weird and that piece about will they tell my parents is a very big concern also if my parents are paying the insurance they will get an explanation of benefits most people do not look at that i will say i don't know the numbers but most people don't look at that um but i can see some real concerns and for those of you who were shaking your head when charlie was just saying this whole like war around you know doctors saying things like that i have to tell that story if anyone i've done this before yeah so i was working i was doing

a presentation for a group of folks who are in their 70s and 80s and one of the women who was in her i want to guess that i don't usually ask people their age but it was an event for people in their 70s and 80s and above um she had started dating again and she had an STI and her gynecologist essentially said if this you know if this if you're gonna whore around this is what you should expect and as horrible as that was to hear and as angry as I was I mean there was a sweeping wave from the crowd of like how do we support you that shouldn't have happened yeah but that was her medical provider that she'd probably been with for decades I mean, he had been the person I know she had kids, maybe the person who delivered her kids like that is horribly judgmental. And and for the older generation, they were kind of taught not to question the doctors, right? Doctors saying this absolutely horrible thing to me. Maybe it's true. It isn't, by the way, you can have sex with whoever you want when you're in your 70s, as long as you're not in a partner relationship.

and it's consensual and everybody's informed and yeah if you're in a partner relationship and and and you're monogamous then it should only be your partner but if you know otherwise do what you want to do um but we have partner thinks you're monogamous yeah but but i've heard stories about that i i have worked at a number of universities and i very much encourage people to go do testing on campus sti testing and i was at one university that i will not name um but the the thing i kept hearing was this person was so judgmental like they would ask how many people i was sexually involved with and i would tell them and they would like sneer and give me this face and like kind of be like when you get what you get and it wasn't one person

it was repeated over years that i was hearing this to the point where i was no longer recommending they go to the university health system i was recommending i was lucky we were an area that had a lot of local clinics um but if you're like if you were charlie here say that thing about uh doctors are going to judge you that happens it 100 happens not all doctors some of the doctors out there are incredible but but the damage that's done by the ones who aren't can can really be shaming and and cause patients not to trust the system and then not go get help when they actually do need help. And sometimes inadvertently reinforcing misinformation, don't you think? Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Yeah. I think the other thing that contributes to this need for Dr. Google

is something that we've done a couple of episodes on from different angles is the lack of inclusive or comprehensive sex ed. We don't provide the language. we don't start early enough we don't all of these things um especially in america wait are you saying our sex ed sucks in this country i i have to figure out where i heard that before um it's not coming to me oddly enough but like i demanded that be one of our i'll let you talk on the topic and i'll find the reference for those of you who haven't listened to that episode i think it's one i think that was my one of my demands when we first started doing the podcast was that i wanted to do something

I'm very sorry it had to be one of the first episodes outside of our first 10 um our sex and it's funny because we like we don't have very lgbtq inclusive sex ed and you're absolutely right but I also don't think we do good sex ed in general it has nothing to do that it's just heteronormative and it's great for those who are who are who are straight it's not so great for those who are straight either we just do really shitty sex ed um but if that's all you're getting is a very heteronormative kind of sex ed our information anyway at that level yeah um you know and it's funny because i've had people who are like we should do being i think we're on the same page and like yeah we should be doing more sex ed k through 12 i'm like absolutely and i absolutely

think it should start in kindergarten and be age appropriate um and grow as and grow as the as the kids grow and they're like yeah and we should talk about kink in in like high school i'm like should we like i i i i'm working with student teachers who came in like show a condom to like that's great but that's not the reality but then things like that things like kink things like the things we never get to in a con in in sex ed where are people learning the information if not online. So it makes sense to me that and again, I want people to really look at the information they're getting and recognize the limitations of it and just don't take the first answer you get and like kind of, you know, scroll a little bit. I'm not saying you have to go to page two of the

1 million results. Yeah. At least make it past the sponsored results. Yeah. But it makes total sense if if I don't even know if I've been raised as a girl my whole life and it just doesn't feel right for me and I've never heard the term non-binary or agender or genderqueer or or gender fluid like if I don't even know what I if I just know that it doesn't feel right like where am I going to look if not online I'm probably not going to my friends I'm probably not going to family I'm probably not going to religious leaders where where else do we expect people to go right and and that's probably one of the beautiful things is that folks can find community yeah especially if you're the only queer kid you know living in podunk wherever us and you're not safe

to come out you can still find community online yeah and if you are a survivor of whatever it may be miscarriage sexual assault like there's a lot like i just want to throw a miscarriage because we so often go to sexual assault but there's a lot of things that could have happened you are you do you lost a partner to death or divorce like we can find community online if you need gender affirming care you can get online and find folks who can give you the names of physicians and nurses and PAs who are kind and compassionate so I think that going online can be a great way for folks to find a community that may not exist in their real spaces in the real world spaces not real spaces yeah but like immediate physical spaces that they would have access to i think

that's so important to point out is that um you know at the top of the episode you pointed out we put kind of a lot of shame and stigma on turning to dr google or google for any of this um and it's not there shouldn't be shame because as we've said throughout this episode where where can they go where can they go when dr sue um or unzipping taboos um but you find that you can find that community you can potentially find some kind of validation that starts to help you further along in a journey that you may have never found the courage to begin if you didn't if you weren't able to search um peer support if i you know that is a part of community i think but just peer support is so so massively important it really is and and it's not just for folks

who are queer because i i can feel people being like well that's not me you've probably had some issue where you didn't know who else to talk to and getting online and just the fact that you maybe you will find an article that addresses it means you're not the only one um i mean subreddit finding the right subreddit thread can be so helpful and finding the wrong subreddit thread yeah yeah so that's we we want to keep reinforcing be intentional on the clicks that you engage with and if it doesn't feel right back out hit the back button i i went i don't know i was working on a hey dr sue and every once in a while i'll jump on a subreddit just to see what folks are saying and it was it was a bad rabbit hole it was it was a bad and if the person who

had asked me that question had wound up in the same subreddit i can understand what they why they wanted clarification or more information um but if you're like i took this new medication for my heart and suddenly i've lost my sex drive is this normal and you google that and the first thing that pops up is five articles that that are like oh sex drive tanked after this new heart medication you're like oh thank god like i may not even need to go to the doctor i know this is legit i know it's not in my head um and some of these are you know some of these from magazines where they're kind of doing a lot of quoting from lots of experts which are great and i've been that expert before and some of it's stuff like the mayo clinic and web md sometimes can be a little

hit or miss for me um though i'd be happy to come on board and help you with that web md uh i'm a i like the cleveland clinic a lot i like a lot of their stuff they put out but even them sometimes i kind of they're not going to get into some of the the deeper side of things but but it can help you feel like okay this isn't in my head yeah okay i like my blood pressure is going and the reason i keep coming back to this is that a lot of stuff we use for high blood pressure can impact your sexual functioning something most doctors don't tell us and so just to see that article and be like oh there's like a whole article on this so it wasn't written like there's no way someone wrote that just for me this must be a real thing and like that kind

of validation that it's real can go so far and then maybe they'll bring it up to their doctor and they'll be like hey I was reading this article on you know Mayo Clinic and it says this and I'm having that problem it gives them something to launch up that makes it feel more less stigmatized yeah that that piece about finding the language i think helps too especially if you are if you have a provider who is not as comfortable hearing about these challenge you know sex health challenges, it can help you, again, find that language to self advocate or to say, you know what, can you just give me a referral? I don't think I don't think this is the right space for those conversations. Oh, can you refer me to a specialist that can help? So so the search results

can help it's just being aware of the information and the sources of the information that you're clicking on and that's that's something I think we had a couple episodes ago porn literacy is where that where we got into a lot of that like just being aware of the source of the information did it say sponsored right above the the result if so that means someone paid to make sure that they were one of the top three search results and yeah for example in the uh way depending on where you are if you search for abortion a sponsored result may be a pregnancy crisis center lots of air quotes for those of you who are still listening lots of air quotes there um and we know many times those crisis centers are driven by

fundamentalist christian groups and pro-life groups so it's being mindful of those is is the overall point there um but it it can it can be really helpful yeah and you shouldn't be ashamed for typing a search result or no typing in a question i mean i say the doctors all the time i'll be like yeah i was on reddit looking that up because you didn't talk to me about that being a know how to do this yeah and I want to know if it was like a thing um can we talk about using though um Dr. Google or WebMD or any other symptom tracker um to talk about the reliability of those results yes yes please do so so in the textbook I wrote we're now on the god right now I'm working I think on the eighth edition um you know I haven't been on since I think I joined on

fifth so um one of the things that i remember doing when i first joined the book was writing a whole section on like should you you know should you run through a symptom checker like how accurate are those things and i don't think shocker to anyone i'm going to say that they weren't really all that effective and and i'm talking about maybe 10 years ago now that we started that i started doing the work writing that piece and there's good news and bad news here because thanks to ai um the symptom trackers are actually getting a lot but not not trackers checkers uh the you know plug in all these symptoms am i gonna die kind of thing they've actually become more accurate not 100 and they do not replace your health care um but they've

gotten more accurate but what's really interesting is that whether most i kind of want to go on a tangent there because there are doctors who are using ai in situations of like i don't know what this is like help me with a differential diagnosis um i have folks that i know whose kids are being um treated for like nut allergies and the the protocol was actually written by ai or by a doctor with ai so so medical assisted yeah so so medical staff uses this what i found really interesting and i don't have the numbers for those of you who've never been um who've never listen to the show I like to make up percentages so I just don't bother finding the real thing but it was somewhere in the high 70s maybe low 80s we'll go low just so I can't be wrong the

wrong way what they found was when they were looking at whether or not these symptom checkers were accurate most of the time the correct diagnosis was probably somewhere in the top 10 most people don't go all the way through the top 10 yeah they're looking at top three yeah but what was interesting was that about 70 in higher range was how accurate it got the triaging so is this a i need to go to the doctor in the next 24 hours or make an appointment and try to get an issue yeah it was actually much more accurate about that than it was about correctly diagnosing the thing and the reason for that is that you're putting in the symptoms you're aware of your your medical staff can put in the symptoms that they're picking up you're not

mattering your blood pressure your your medical staff should be um if you've ever gone in for something where you're like oh my shoulder hurts and they're like well how's your how's your neck feeling and you're like that's my neck what my shoulder they're connected and so you know you're not always looking at the whole system where hopefully medical staff is which is why the symptom trackers are symptom checkers are only as good as what you're putting in and you're only knowing the story that you are acutely aware of but the fact that these things are like yeah you You should go get health care and you should go like as soon as humanly possible or like, hey, this isn't like a tomorrow, but maybe in the next week or you may be able to put those off. The fact that that is is getting more accurate actually makes me feel better.

Because my fear is that people are looking things up and they're like, oh, you know, it's just a flesh wound. My arm's falling out of my shoulder, but it's just a flesh wound. whereas if they're getting the result of hey this may be a real medical emergency you should probably seek care within 24 hours if that's translating them to actually doing it that's fantastic yeah and that because it feels safer because it's not like i'm talking to my buddy my buddy's like oh that sounds scary like if the internet's telling me this might be really something i should get checked out maybe i should i don't know if it translates to behavior but if it did that would be fantastic that it's getting better at that piece of it well it's that validation

piece because if you're someone who maybe lives alone like you're not alone in your life but you live alone and you don't want to for whatever reason feel like you're constantly an alarmist and always going to the doctor for every little thing yeah it's that validation piece of like oh no no no I should go this isn't this isn't in my head I'm not being an alarmist I'm not being a hypochondriac um so i think there's that piece of it too for that that ai triage yeah success rate and i love that that part is getting better i mean it'd be nice if it didn't didn't quite bury the lead on some of the diagnoses but again we're giving it limited information so the system is always good is what we're giving it and that's that's the important

piece too like absolutely if doctor google if googling whatever you need an immediate answer on um is gonna help on any level if it's a potential diagnosis your doctor said hey we got your test results back we need you to come in my god what that triggers internally for many people um because they can't give you information over the phone nope for a variety of of laws and reasons um Which is good because the thing that they need, they need to see you physically because they're looking at the condition of your skin, your eyes, your nails, your smell, all of those things. Your provider needs to be in your presence to have that comprehensive picture as they're working towards whatever cure, treatment plan, etc. So but I do want to reiterate that as long as it's something that doesn't trigger some kind of long term anxiety or habitual checking that leads you to feeling like you may always be ill or may actually trigger more anxiety and kind of compulsion to check everything. um please do it and just be mindful of what it triggers for you right because it may not but

there are people out there we're a variety of humans with a variety of mental triggers and and it could trigger that kind of compulsive oh my i twitched one one day you know right so every every day i'm looking up new symptoms because every day it feels different and every day i'm kind of getting in my own attitude much yeah yeah but find that community find find the language it's it's helpful there shouldn't don't dr sue and charlie don't judge you or shame you for asking dr google a question nope we just want you to be wise consumers of the information that you're getting yeah and use it use it in the best way that you can and if it says go to the doctor go to the doctor if it's bloody or drippy or smelly like that's usually my doctor anyway

yeah it's bloody or drippier or there's stuff coming out of holes that's not usually coming out of holes that's usually my big thing about you should go to that's where i'm like phd not md if it but also just trust your instincts and this is one of the things i i usually encourage um especially women because women their symptoms are more likely to be poo-pooed like oh you just think you're having symptoms um trust your body and we've all seen these stories all over social media about women who are like i kept getting told it was not a thing it wasn't a thing i went to doctor after doctor after doctor year after year after year and i finally found someone who listened to me if the symptom checker says there's nothing wrong with you but you know something's

off you you get to overrule yeah the internet on that one you are the expert on your body and what what you're feeling and and everything that's that's an important takeaway that reminds me of something I saw recently on Instagram it was a doctor posted a picture of an x-ray of a bone and it it was a a type of bone cancer that was shown in the x-ray but it was like a patient's x-ray comes back as this what it what's your diagnosis in the comments well it depends if it was a woman when when was her last period the comments did not disappoint it was some nice comic relief but but yeah trust your trust your instincts trust your body if if it's gonna help in some way

answer some immediate questions or give you language before you go into even if you're going in um to support a friend you know um it just it's it's information and the doctor can say yeah i don't typically like when my patients do that but i get it and here's here's what we've actually found about this blah blah blah you know but i've had doctors say that to me right now i'm fantastic health care team but i've had doctors say that to me be like well If I didn't have to wait three months to get an appointment. Yeah. Wouldn't be searching for my own answers.

Yeah. Yeah. So here we are. So who do they go to if they want to make sure since we've been saying things like wise consumers. Yeah. Where, where should they go? What things should they look for to make sure they are consuming responsibly? Well, there's us.

I mean. Yeah. We're a valid source. Dr. Sue and Aunt Charlie. Yeah, we're a valid source. You can always submit questions that you have, but there will not be an immediacy. And I want to make sure I'm owning that. There's no immediacy.

And because it's anonymous, we can't reach out to you with further questions. But if there's a general topic you want us to cover or general things you want us to dive into, submit a show suggestion or a show idea. If it's something where, again, there's no immediacy and I am not, I'm not an MD doctor, I'm a PhD doctor. and i will very often in my hey dr sue posts be like i really think you should probably go see a health care provider if i think that's appropriate but you can submit information to me you can look through you know our last podcast for information you lost my path my posts

normally i would tell you to look at the end of a website and if it's.gov it's trustable but quite frankly it's not anymore not in 2025 no the government has been pulling down some some relatively good research i mean sources i've used my entire teaching career critical research critical yeah and like up-to-date numbers and it's disappearing and we know certain states are not publishing information and that's not as so i feel like i want to go can i can i have a little tangent here of course so in my classes I always ask students where they go home like I know where we're all going to school but I always also ask them where they go home either what state they're from or what province or what country or you know just just generals of where they're from

and then when we do things about like education or consent laws or STIs I will break it down to their state province country if they're giving me another country I try to break it down from there but sometimes that's not possible because i want them to have the most accurate data for them to make the decisions that are best for them and i will tell you that there are some states that do not release data the way i want them to great states are great they're like oh do you want to know by street um but other states it's like what's an sti there was one country where they wouldn't they wouldn't do anything like i couldn't get anything and i i'm like emailing their departments of health like now and now it's a challenge yeah and i'm i'm not getting anything

um so be careful because even and i'm not just talking federal government even at the state level some states are not giving out accurate information and we've seen that we started i mean i think it became really obvious during covid when they weren't really giving us i was just gonna say yeah such a date data as they could no more glaring example than when everybody in the country was looking for information and states were like we're firing our health secretary no we don't really do contact tracing yeah um so i normally i would say dot gov but or whatever your state dot gov is but i'm a little leery about doing that these days uh i like i like i like the cleveland clinic i really do also because they do a lot of stuff

with men's health and you know that's my jam yeah um if it's specific if you're looking for specific information and you would just maybe you don't want us to do a whole show on it and you just kind of want us to mention it we'd find a way to do that but um advocates for youths got good information not necessarily about health conditions but about education Planned Parenthood does some good work Bedsider does some good work um and I'm not leaving anyone out on purpose I'm sure we're going to end this call this call this the zoom thing and I'm going to be like oh man there's like 10 other agencies i use a lot of um when in doubt read the about section and i don't need you to read the whole page and the whole mission statement blah blah blah um but you'll

know really damn quick if this sounds like a legit site to you and if you are looking for something that's faith-based cool um but but take that five seconds to kind of read through the about section Yeah, that's really important. Because that that also tells you who's funding it. And that's always kind of my big, that's my beginning point, with any kind of research I'm doing, especially if I'm trying to find out information about what could be deemed a controversial topic or issue or anything like that. My first question is, who paid to get this information out there? yeah yeah and that can tell you a lot and then you can go to there about and see what they're what they're all about i feel like i'm missing so many sites that i normally send people to but it really probably are but we can always update the episode description to to include just know that we will do our best to give some of our top recommendations but it's not a comprehensive list and if you have a source that you trust that you recommend leave it in the comment of the episode

description we absolutely want to help you know we want that information out there for everybody because that's a huge reason why we started this podcast was the equity of this kinds of this kind of information it that that's part of our mission that's our about us that's our mission i feel like we need to tell i feel like i have to throw my students under the bus for that because that's really how we kind of got here but i do want to point out the trevor project and rain and two very different things Trevor Project is LGBTQ plus RAINN is for folks who've been through sexual assault incest or abuse so yeah it's really topic specific but those are the two that were like mention these yeah so just to throw my students under the bus before I think we're getting ready

to wrap up um so my students you know we're all in the class a little bit early and they're repeating some crap horrendous information and I'm like wait where did you even get that from or they'll be like hey dr millstein is this true and i'm like wait why where like what is this coming from i'm like oh i was listening to this podcast i was listening to this influencer i was listening to this and i was just like why and they're like it's not like you have a podcast that we can listen to and and i've gotten that for a couple years before i was finally like all right challenge accepted like you're right you're absolutely fair enough yeah there are some wonderful sex educators who are doing work um but a lot of us have other jobs and can't do this kind

of stuff full time or we're getting shadow banned or lots of other reasons why you may not be able to find us so um yeah definitely leave a comment if you've got a good source for information be careful with reddit yes i miss folks be careful with reddit um i think that's yeah don't don't be a shame to use the Dr. Google, just, just be a good wise consumer of information that you're getting. Yeah. Yeah. Well, all right, everyone, if I want to thank you all for listening to us and this episode of what you do when you don't have a Dr. Sue, if you like what you heard and saw, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review and share the episode with someone who's ready to unzip a few of these taboos with us now that we're on video feel free to wave back or even

shout at the screen we won't hear you but we'll love the vibe got a question or topic idea we want to hear about them so head to the link in the episode description share what's on your mind and until next time we'll see you soon on your screen and in your ears i do want to give a very special shout out to ali o'brien for our incredible theme music thank you so much ali and keep the conversations going keep them zipping those taboos and everyone take care