Microsoft Researchers Study "Cyberchondria" 144
Slatterz introduces us to the first major study on "cyberchondria" by Microsoft researchers (abstract, paper [PDF]). The news that it can be a bad idea to search the Internet to see if you have a terrible disease should come as no surprise. According to the NYTimes article, the syndrome has been known as "cyberchondria" since at least the year 2000 (we discussed it a few years back). It refers to increased anxiety brought on when people with little or no medical training go searching for answers to common medical complaints on the Web. The article compares cyberchondria with a phenomenon well known among second-year medical students, called "medical schoolitis." The researchers note that Web searchers' propensity to jump to awful conclusions is "basic human behavior that has been noted by research scientists for decades."
hm (Score:1, Informative)
I've been mis-diagnosed by doctors and found the problem successfully myself (and then had doctors treat). One time it involved cancer, but I can think of at least 2 other times. Not that I'm smarter than doctors or anything like that, but sometimes it does help to study things yourself.
Re:Same rules apply... (Score:3, Informative)
The Microsoft research paper addresses this directly by comparing and contrasting how users responded to searches through MSN and MSN Health and Fitness, which searches a limited number of trusted sources for public health information. As you would expect, sites which are carefully vetted and never needlessly provocative or alarmist calm most fears.
Re:Even worse... (Score:3, Informative)
the citation of new memes shocks me slightly only because old ones are lost too easily.
i mean, i don't have housemaid's knee !!!!!!!!!!11111~~~~
for the uninitiated :
I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch - hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into - some fearful, devastating scourge, I know - and, before I had glanced half down the list of "premonitory symptoms," it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.
I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever - read the symptoms - discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it - wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus's Dance - found, as I expected, that I had that too, - began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically - read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright's disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid's knee.
I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadn't I got housemaid's knee? Why this invidious reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid's knee. Gout, in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my being aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from boyhood. There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded there was nothing else the matter with me.
I sat and pondered. I thought what an interesting case I must be from a medical point of view, what an acquisition I should be to a class! Students would have no need to "walk the hospitals," if they had me. I was a hospital in myself. All they need do would be to walk round me, and, after that, take their diploma.
all hail Jerome K. Jerome.
* if there really is somebody who has not read this book, do that tomorrow. citation from http://www.classicbookshelf.com/library/jerome_k_jerome/three_men_in_a_boat/0/ [classicbookshelf.com]