I love it when people take control of their own health. In past generations doctors were often the sole source of information on diseases and conditions. It was normal to rely on physicians to interpret every symptom, ache, or pain. You went to your doctor to assess the symptoms and did whatever your doctor advised. Medical journals were intended for medical professionals rather than consumers and were only accessible at university libraries or by subscription. Nowadays more than 100 million people annually turn to the Internet before heading to a doctor. The Apple Watch 11 even monitors your blood oxygen levels, blood pressure and heart arrhythmia. There are all manner of diagnostic tests patients can order themselves. I get annual bloodwork (ordered by a doctor I have never met) that goes into my medical record. Every December my Facebook feed is inundated with direct pay MRI offers, blood tests for multiple cancers and EKG apps requiring a monthly subscription. Most doctors recommend against these diagnostic, self-ordered tests in asymptomatic people saying there is no evidence they extend life but often expand costs. If only patients began acting like consumers but that is a story for another day.
Does DIY health care have a downside? An opinion piece in the Guardian claims is does. With more information on health and disease at their fingertips, hypochondriacs have more resources than past generations to fuel their angst. One psychologist wrote:
In my clinical work, a new ritual has become commonplace. Clients no longer just describe their symptoms, they often arrive with printouts, screenshots of dense articles, some AI chatbot information and the phrase “I’ve done my research.”
Sometimes patients are correct. In most cases, they are not. More from The Guardian:
What can follow this self-directed research is half-understood statistics, cherry-picked case studies, viral social media threads and anecdotes masquerading as legitimate data. I’ve seen anxiety spiral from misreading a side-effect profile and depressive withdrawal justified by a misinterpreted, dangerously low-quality study.
Confirmation bias amplifies and confirms our preexisting angst while dismissing information that contradicts them. More from the Guardian:
Confirmation bias, for example, leads us to seize upon the one outlier study that confirms our fears. The Dunning-Kruger effect allows a few hours on YouTube to foster an illusion of expertise that dismisses experts who have decades of clinical training.
It is not difficult to understand how social media and the internet can negatively affect the worried well. Just think what social media has done to conspiracy theories. Medical information is no different. YouTube doctors and charlatans alike can teach about conditions. People recognize symptoms in themselves and legitimize their own fears, both real and imagined. The term coined to describe this condition is cyberchondria.
Cyberchondria is a recent phenomenon where people google symptoms and amplify heath anxiety. The following is from Science News Today:
Imagine the scene: you feel a twinge of chest pain, a slight rash, or a persistent headache. Concerned, you open your search engine and type in your symptoms. Within seconds, you are faced with a sea of results—some benign, others terrifying. What began as a mild worry quickly escalates as you scroll through page after page of possible causes. The common cold morphs into pneumonia, indigestion into heart disease, a tension headache into a brain tumor. Anxiety spikes. Your pulse races. You can’t stop reading, can’t stop imagining the worst.
This spiral has a name: cyberchondria. It is the modern cousin of hypochondria—health anxiety amplified by the vast, unfiltered ocean of online medical information. In our quest for reassurance, we often find fear instead.
Patient communities, online disease forums, and social media platforms can boost cyberchondria. Hypochondria (and cyberchondria) do not just interfere with wellbeing. It can also increase costs and strain the health care system with unnecessary physician visits, unnecessary tests, and lab work. Compulsive health searches tends to worsen symptoms rather than alleviate them. Recognizing the cycle is a key step in breaking the cycle, but googling disease and condition will never go away. Awareness can transform a simple act of checking a symptom from spiraling into a worrying about a dreaded disease you do not actually have.
Read more at The Guardian: Scrolling and worrying: the hidden dangers of DIY diagnosis
Also see Science News Today: Cyberchondria: Why Googling Symptoms Often Makes Anxiety Worse