Cyberchondria: Digital Self-Misdiagnosis

"Cyberchondria: It's not just in your head" from the Wall Street Journal reports on the latest psychiatric malady - cyberchondria - where people's hypocondria is accelerated by web searches with information that sends them into panic mode.

A couple of nerdotrons at Microsoft just published online the results of a look at how people search for medical information. The results, culled from logs of web searches and surveys of more than 500 Microsoft volunteers, were sobering, if not surprising. (Read the report, if you dare, for more details on the methods and findings.)

“People tend to look at just the first couple results,” Eric Horvitz, one of the Microsoft researchers told the New York Times. “If they find ‘brain tumor’ or ‘ALS,’that’s their launching point.” Horvitz is a computer scientist and doc.

The basic problem boils down to garbage-in equals garbage-out. “The tendency of web searchers to start with a single symptom that is coarsely reported and also coarsely referred to in Web content can stimulate potentially unwarranted anxiety,” the researchers write.