by Hannah Russell

Created on: January 06, 2011   Last Updated: January 13, 2011

Everyone their own doctor: this was once called the Thomsonian ideal.  Thomsonian medicine, popular in the mid-nineteenth century is dead today.  Perhaps because it wasn’t all that effective in the long-run. It is said that as we conquer one disease, another one will rise up to take its place.  However, you probably never considered one would pop up called “cyberchondria.”  It does sound like something named by teenagers, but it is no joking matter.  It is a real problem that is the subject of several recent medical studies and is officially in Webster’s Dictionary.  What is cyberchondria?  It is neo-hypochondria; a person looks up their symptoms on the internet and is suddenly convinced they have the top-result disease which will, of course, shortly kill them. 

Obviously, a major risk of this is that it raises a lot of anxiety which is unfounded.  Sure, there can probably be anecdotal situations where people are given valuable information and save their lives by going to the doctor and ending up having some bizarre, tropical disease that no one, perhaps not even that doctor, had ever heard of.  However, the majority of these cases end in serious, unfounded anxiety.  Why is this?  Well, for one, many of these online symptom-checkers work by occurrence on the internet.  The top results will not display what is statistically the most common cause of that symptom, but what is statistically found most on the internet.  No one researches the benign stuff that just happens and goes away—medical research spends time on things that kill people and things with very little cure.  Those research articles, or news releases on those articles, are what are getting the hits. Not pages about the common cold. 

As a little experiment, let’s put in some usually benign symptoms into a commonly-used online symptom-checkers.  Let’s put in muscle stiffness, headache, nausea and fatigue.  Logically, this is probably a case of the flu. Admittedly, influenza can be very dangerous, but it generally passes by on its own. However, this symptom-checker says that our hypothetical person has septic meningitis, chronic kidney disease, carbon monoxide poisoning, multiple sclerosis, an ectopic pregnancy or the mumps.  These are all significantly more frightening than the possibility of influenza.  It does not take much imagination to see how much anxiety this could possibly cause, when our hypothetical person has a one-day case of the flu. 

A more serious implication of this cyberchondria is its potential to attack diagnostics.  Doctors rely greatly on a patient’s ability to accurately report their symptoms.  However, someone who has been told that they probably have carbon monoxide poisoning may present with symptoms that they believe are there, but are psychosomatic. Their body has the ability to, in their anxiety, manipulate their symptoms.  They are not even lying—they have tricked themselves.

Yes, it is important for the public to be informed and to know the right questions to ask their doctors.  It is important for a patient to think and consider the possibilities so they are able to work with their doctor as effectively as possible.  But telling someone with a routine, common illness that they have an ectopic pregnancy is not an effective way of informing the public.

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