Growing reliance of online medical advice highlights Canada’s doctor shortage

According to a new survey, nearly a third of Canadians are turning to online advice because they don’t have access to a doctor. CTV’s Tyler Fleming reports.

A growing number of Canadians are turning to the internet for medical advice as the country faces a critical shortage of family doctors.

A new survey by the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) and Abacus Data suggests more than one-third of Canadians (37 per cent) have felt they had no choice but to get their health information online because they couldn’t access a doctor.

CMA president Dr. Joss Reimer warns the trend can come with significant risks. The survey found that 42 per cent of respondents had followed medical advice found online, with 23 per cent experiencing negative outcomes as a result.

“That’s a big problem,” said Reimer. “No other generation has had to deal with this level of a double whammy where both they are being bombarded by misinformation that’s pushed on them by social media algorithms, whether they’re looking for it or not, and they don’t have access to a family doctor who could have that trusted conversation with them about their health concerns.”

The CMA approximates 6.5 million Canadians do not have a regular family doctor or nurse practitioner and attributes the doctor shortage to several factors, including retiring physicians, fewer new doctors pursuing family medicine, and burnout among health-care providers.

To address these challenges, Reimer advocates for team-based care, where pharmacists, nurses, and other health-care professionals work collaboratively to support more patients.

“We want to invest in those teams so that we can have the whole team take on more patients and be available to more Canadians. We also want to see a decrease in the administrative burden because our family doctors spend 10 to 19 hours a week on paperwork,” Reimer said.

Adding to the challenges is the rise of pay-per-use virtual medical services, where consultations can cost close to $100 per visit.

“This should not be allowed,” says Steven Staples, the Canadian Health Coalition’s national director of policy and advocacy. “Virtual care can have a great benefits in term of improving access for people, but it shouldn’t be done at the expensive Medicare. We need our own provincial systems to deliver virtual care, so it stays within our provincial Medicare system. I’d say that would be a good way to move forward with this to improve access while at the same time getting more doctors and expanding the scope of care to other health-care professionals.”

Critics say this raises concerns about the creation of a two-tiered health-care system in a country where care is supposed to be universal.

Staples notes that many virtual websites can charge patients, by finding loopholes in laws, like consulting with a doctor practicing in another province.

“The real danger here is that people who have really good jobs with private insurance or have enough money to buy their own access over the internet to a doctor are going to be able to access essential medical services and everybody else is just going to suffer,” says Staples. “And while it’s mostly Canadian companies right now, you can bet there’s a lot of companies south of the border, big American health-care companies, that are looking at this as a lucrative market. So, what you might be getting down the road is access to a doctor who’s not even in Canada — maybe in the United States or elsewhere — so this is a dangerous slippery slope, and the federal government has to work with provincial governments to rein this in right away.”

As online health advice becomes a growing trend, experts urge Canadians to be cautious about misinformation and advocate for reforms to make health care more accessible.