Cyberchondria. A New (Techy) Disease.
I have a B.S. in Information Technology, not a M.D. Therefore, should I (or anyone else in that matter) self-diagnose ourselves using information we find online from sites like WebMD or the Mayo Clinic ?
We’ve all done it- googled a symptom to see if it fits the list for a sinus infection or strep throat… but how will access to medical information change the way we view disease?
Microsoft researchers published the results of a study of health-related Web searches on popular search engines as well as a survey of the company’s employees.
The study suggests that self-diagnosis by search engine frequently leads Web searchers to conclude the worst about what ails them.
The researchers said they had not intended their work to send the message that people should ignore symptoms. But their examination of search records indicated that researching particular symptoms often led quickly to anxiousness.
They found that roughly 2 percent of all Web queries were health-related, and about 250,000 users, or about a quarter of the sample, engaged in a least one medical search during the study.
About a third of the subjects “escalated” their follow-up searches to explore serious illnesses, the researchers said.
Read the published results from microsoft here.
Let’s leave the diagnosis to the experts, ahem, technology experts?
