It always starts out innocently enough — for example, with an eye twitch. It’s just a little tic, but it keeps coming and going over the course of a few weeks, and so I decide to do a little medical investigation online. I plug “recurrent eye twitch” into my friendly search engine and, after several hours poring over a range of health-related Web sites — skimming over likely explanations such as fatigue, stress and too much caffeine in favor of dozens of worst-case scenarios, and growing increasingly panicky all the while — I am utterly convinced that I have multiple sclerosis, at the very least, and quite possibly Lou Gehrig’s disease.But what really ails me? Cyberchondria, loosely defined as the baseless fueling of fears and anxiety about common health symptoms due to Internet research, or, as I like to think of it, Googling oneself into a state of absolute, clinical hysteria over every last pain, itch and strange freckle on your body.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/06/AR2009110603473.html
A glut of Google can give you cyberchondria
It always starts out innocently enough — for example, with an eye twitch. It’s just a little tic, but it keeps coming and going over the course of a few weeks, and so I decide to do a little medical investigation online. I plug “recurrent eye twitch” into my friendly search engine and, after several hours poring over a range of health-related Web sites — skimming over likely explanations such as fatigue, stress and too much caffeine in favor of dozens of worst-case scenarios, and growing increasingly panicky all the while — I am utterly convinced that I have multiple sclerosis, at the very least, and quite possibly Lou Gehrig’s disease.