In Health Care News: Looking at Cyberchondria, The Fear of What The Internet Says About Your Symptoms
Tuesday Feb 17, 2009In Health Care News: Looking at Cyberchondria, The Fear of What The Internet Says About Your Symptoms in General Healthcare
Every day, millions of people go online to research their health
symptoms, only to find the worst of the worst diagnoses in their search
results. And these results, for lack of a better phrase, are freaking people
out big time.
The popular phrase that’s used for this is “cyberchondria,” which we’ll define as “the fear of the Internet’s diagnosis of your health symptoms.”
For example, when you search online for the word “headache” you’ll get results telling you it could be anything from a brain tumor to simple caffeine deficiency.
Unfortunately, because people tend to be natural worriers, we gravitate toward the bleaker results.
According to a medical news article in the Orlando Sentinel, researchers from Microsoft found a search for minor conditions frequently lead online users to pages with very serious conditions.
“People get scared and they only focus on the scary stuff. They don’t focus on the stuff that’s typical,” said Dr. Anthony Douglas, a physician based in Maitland, Florida.
But these serious illnesses are rare. Only one in 10,000 Americans has a brain tumor, for instance, reported the Sentinel article.
Cyberchondria is actually frustrating some doctors, who see patients taking what they find on the Web much too far. One mother was sure that her son had a tumor on his leg. But the hard, purple bump turned out to be nothing more than hardened grape jelly.
The wealth of knowledge we have on the Internet surely isn’t a bad thing, but self-diagnosing from online information probably should be avoided.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with checking things out online. But be careful of taking the grim search results too seriously.
“We’re taught in medical school that when most people have a headache, they have a headache. They don’t have a brain tumor,” said Dr. Bradley Block, another physician in Florida.
Think of it this way: Would you trust the diagnosis from a stranger who wasn’t a doctor, but just did a Google search of your symptoms?
It’s usually just better to go to a doctor.
