Cyberchondriac

Doctors are on the alert for a new kind of victim: the cyberchondriac. With so much health information now on the Internet, thousands of people are using their computers to try to match symptoms with diseases.

The growth of the Internet—arguably the fastest-growing new technology in history—has generated explosive growth of people who search the Web for healthcare information related to specific diseases. We call these people "cyberchondriacs." […] The diseases that generate the greatest use of the Web are depression (19 percent of cyberchondriacs), allergies or sinus (16 percent), cancer (15 percent), bipolar disorder (14 percent), arthritis or rheumatism (10 percent), high blood pressure (10 percent), migraine (9 percent), anxiety disorder (9 percent), heart disease (8 percent) and sleep disorders (8 percent).

Some doctors complain that they are being plagued by a new type of hypochondriac, dubbed the cyberchondriac, a condition in which patients arrive at the surgery armed with piles of information to try to prove that they have a certain illness. A quick internet search for information on back pain illustrates the problem. Search for the word 'backache' using the Excite search engine, for example, and you are presented with a list of 2643 sites.

Faced with the printout-wielding patient or ‘cyberchondriac’, it is tempting to take the view that the Internet is the spawn of the Devil. However, a better strategy may be to offer more reliable Internet sites for the patient to visit; […]

None of them carried news of research into his condition, but there was enough for any cyberchondriac to get his mind around.

Word Watch: Cyberchondriac [title] Definition: A person who's convinced he or she has a particular medical condition based on information found on the Internet.

An article in the April 2012 issue of ‘Psychological Science’ suggested that the irrational tendency at work in the brains of cyberchondriacs is the same as that in the brains of gamblers. When gamblers get a positive roll of the dice, they think that their luck will continue. When cyberchondriacs match a few of the symptoms for a condition, they take that as a positive sign and may assume they must have the other symptoms on the list.