Weeks before the CDC alerted clinicians and the FDA announced a recall, physicians were already searching for Cyclospora on Doximity.
For most of the spring, Doximity searches related to Cyclospora stayed at or below baseline. Through late May they actually dipped, running well under normal levels.
The first sign of movement came in mid-June, when searches crossed above baseline for the first time and held there. Then, the week of June 30, the line broke. Searches roughly tripled, then jumped again the following week, and by mid-July they had climbed more than 15,000% above baseline.
That mid-June uptick tracks closely with June 22, the date the CDC later identified as the start of illness onsets. And the steepest part of the climb came before the public alerts: physician searches were already surging when the CDC issued its HAN alert to clinicians on July 13, with the FDA's recall alert following on July 18.
The pattern is consistent. Physician interest built ahead of the official notifications, roughly in step with when people were actually falling ill.
From a search spike to answers physicians can use
A physician seeing a possible Cyclospora case needs current information they can use at the point of care. In Ask, they can look up the latest, from symptoms and diagnostic testing to treatment and patient management. Ask organizes the relevant evidence and links to the underlying medical sources, so physicians can review the material directly.
Ask also surfaces relevant PeerCheck reviews. These show when an AI-generated answer has been evaluated by a physician, who completed the review, and when it was last updated. PeerCheck reviewers assess answers for clinical accuracy, evidence strength, and potential bias, and their feedback may be incorporated into the answer itself.
So physicians see both the clinical answer and the physician judgment behind it.
Two signals, one workflow
One physician looking something up is routine. Thousands looking up the same thing is a trend taking shape, often before the alerts catch up. That is what happened with Cyclospora. When new health trends start to emerge, Ask is where physicians find what they need next: current recommendations, the sources behind them, and how other physicians have assessed the evidence.