Do You Suffer from Cyberchondria?

People who tend to leap to dire conclusions about their diagnosis based on the results of a web search are called ‘cyberchondriacs’. The classical example is when a persistent headache is diagnosed by the sufferer as a brain tumor, when a far more likely cause is at the root of the problem.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’re obviously ready to look for health information on the Internet. Many visitors come here via search engines, and perhaps are disappointed to find that we don’t provide a ‘diagnostic service’, as some health websites do. Microsoft researchers have studied the results of web searches done for the purpose of self-diagnosis, and published their findings online (open the PDF for the full report).
A survey of how people search for medical information online was made, with the participants’ permission. This was followed by analysis of 515 Microsoft employees’ health-related search experiences.
Web searches for symptoms like headache or chest pain were more likely to take people to pages describing serious conditions, such a cancer or heart attack, than to benign explanations. For example, there were just as many pages linking headache to brain tumors as to caffeine withdrawal, or as many pages pointing to heart attack as indigestion, although in both cases the second ‘option’ was much more likely.
Further analysis showed that researching some symptoms led to anxiety. Almost a third of the participants escalated their searches to exploring serious conditions more fully. The likelihood of such escalation depended on the distribution of the available medical content, the sometimes alarming language used in the content, and the individual searcher’s willingness to accept the possibility of more serious conditions being responsible.
The conclusion: one should not be fooled by Internet search results into a hypochondriacal reaction. The moment one feels drawn to a serious diagnosis is the occasion to make a doctor’s appointment!