Type just about any medical symptom you're experiencing into your browser of choice and you'll find a wealth of potential causes, cures and complications, ranging from the mundane to the catastrophic.
But calling your doctor because you suspect a brain tumor or stroke every time you have a headache only fuels more anxiety, uses up your precious time and, frankly, annoys the heck out of your doctor. After all, he or she didn't go through years of education and training so you could just diagnose yourself on the Internet.
"[I]nformation is not knowledge or understanding, both of which require objectivity, balance, the view from altitude and interpretation," David L. Katz, M.D., MPH, director of the Yale University Prevention Research Center, tells HuffPost Healthy Living via email. "Our culture routinely equates information access with understanding, and that is a very costly mistake in health care."
Of course, self-diagnosis isn't the only thing that gets under doctors' skin. To help preserve the sanity of the people in charge of our care, we asked Katz and other well-known docs to share a few of their biggest patient pet peeves. Here are some we could all benefit from giving up.