Slashdot Mirror
Cyberchondria
Makarand writes "According to this article in the San Francisco Chronicle the ever-expanding
wealth of health information online is keeping hypochondriacs constantly worried. With websites devoted to every major and
esoteric illness and search engines coming up with many disease possibilities
when you type in a symptom, it is becoming very easy for the health-anxious
to believe that they have a disease. Many continue poring through the easily
available medical information even after their doctors have given them
a clean bill of health."
If you are concerned about something health related the best advice I can give is DON'T LOOK ON THE INTERNET and see a doctor. Doctors vists are a great way to get piece of mind, which IMO is well worth the cost/hassle.
But sometimes doctors are wrong and mis-diagnose problems. If someone believes that they have a problem well then they can research it before looking for a second opinion
It's easier to figure out you don't have a disease online than to be convinced you have one.
I see their point in the negitive side of online medical documentation but we must also see the benifit. Dr. Sam Gidding's papers on colesteral helped me lower mine with out having to spen hundreds of dollars on an RD. I see the negitives but I feel the positives greatly out weigh them.
Get paid to read spam
Hey, information can be used in many ways. Providing it makes it easier for regular people to really learn, and for paranoiacs to dive deeper into their (mis)perceptions of ill physical health.
/.) that either baffled a doctor or a series of doctors; perhaps some issues remain unresolved. But let's not shoot the messenger. Providing information about making bombs and providing information that drives hypochondriacs deeper into their sickness are the same thing.
On the other hand, with all we know, it's hard for any doctor to just say "you're fine!" and know that it's a fact. I'm sure many of us have had a problem (and please, let's not list them on
Most information is neutral--blame the users of that information.
I'm not saying insurance is a bad thing, but insurance that says "yes, you can have open heart surgery for $5" is going to affect patient behavior, no way around it.
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
Or the ones they show before they have FDA approval, which merely have a few interesting images, like flowers in a field, or pets playing in the yard. Then they state the name of the product, and say "ask your doctor about product-of-the-month". That's it, no information about what the drug treats, because they haven't gotten the complete approval yet.
Ha!
"Many continue poring through the easily available medical information even after their doctors have given them a clean bill of health."
And they should, because doctors can't differenciate a Headache from Meningitis if they caught it contagiously and then they died from it. Seriously, a 2 minute talk with a doctor and i can get out of there with about any brand of pills i actually researched a little. For example.
"Hey doc, i'm having panic attacks, do you think i should get Rivotril? My friend's friend used to have those, and she said it works well."
"Sure, here have these, take X per X hours/days"
"Thanks doc"
2 minutes. Only 2. It's come more to social charisma contests than actual diagnostics. Not to mention about doctors who dont even try anymore. You have panic disorder? Try some Morphine.
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Interesting that it comes up now, because after reading about Asperger Syndrome in this Slashdot-article a few days ago, I actually went to an AS-support group and asked whether I had it. Embarrassing, I know. Luckily the people on the forum turned out to be quite friendly and as it turns out my symptoms are more related to a mild case of social phobia.
If something is wrong with a person, the internet can serve as a useful tool during the initial information-finding phase. The unguided nature of the internet does carry the risk of misidentifying or imagining diseases or conditions. It should therefore never be used as a substitute for professional help!
I think I'm slowly slipping into this category. I get a pain (actually, I've got a few right now) and I feel the need to do something diagnostic about it...right then. So, I research what ills me via Google or WebMD. To me, this is no different than researching that funny noise my hard drive is making or the source of a system error of some sort. Have a problem? Research it online.
And the truth is, after reading this stuff over and over and applying amateur diagnostic methods I can come up with the most hideous of diseases. Sad thing is, I can't simply run some system util to fix things. So, I slowly become more and more worried. Obsessive even.
It seems quite logical to research this stuff. But I can't suppress the urge to keep reading. And I have difficulties suppressing the worries this process induces.
I think there's a wrong trend that sites that should not give this kind of information are the ones that are listed on top in a Google search. As usual on the internet, apply common sense first... but a lot of people read it, and if it's on a popular site... well, it must be true then of course. I did check with my uncle later on (he's a doctor) and he confirmed my research, diagnosis & cure. He also confirmed that the trend I noticed is a pain in the butt for most doctors, because a lot of people tend to think they have something dramatic (bragging rights on a tea party perhaps?) while they don't. He says consult times have a longer duration now because not only does he have to diagnose & write out a prescription if needed, but he also has to tell the patient his or her issue is not that grave.
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
It just contains pictures and information about what your body would look like and act like if it was normal. This means it has gross pictures of things that people would get alarmed at if they didn't know it was normal.
Today's editorial: "That's not a wart."
This is certainly true, and there are many instances of big pharma promoting drugs for unlicensed usage, or made up diseases
The problem is not just big pharma per se, but also the way it funds special interest groups (e.g. Multiple sclerosis, osteoporosis) to campaign for wildly expensive drugs of dubious efficacy. This is the malignant end of astroturfing, and many of these supposedly educational sites have a message "this drug works and your doctor better give it to you".
Unfortunately these sort of 'infomercial'/'advertorial' websites do not come under any advertising control body, especially if they are produced at arms length by a 'charity/ self help group'.
I know GPs (Family Physicians) in affluent areas who spend a lot of their time fending off the 'worried well' who look up stuff on the internet. It is actually these people, rather than the true cyberchondriac (who are relatively easy to spot) who make our life difficult, as they haven't bothered to learn probability or epidemiology on their trawl through the websites.
Humorous signatures are over-rated.
IMO, misinformation is much worse than information overload. I know a few people who go to alternative therapists pretty much exclusively and get told an amazing load of bullshit. Sure, doctors don't have all the answers and their judgement is often skewed by the pharmaceutical industry peddling new expensive drugs. But I'll take their advice over the alternative snake oil salesmen any day.
One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there
Perhaps an antihistamine or a corticosteroid? Do you have any idea what an allergy is? Immune response times n -- the resin from poison ivy causes an allergic reaction (it is not "toxic" to the body, just causes this reaction -- remember that certain people are immune to poison ivy). Calming the immune system down with antihistamines or corticosteroids, depending on the severity of pruritic dermatitis is quite advisable depending on the situation. If your child had taken the course prescribed by the physician, he would have been all right. You are the classic case of the cyberchondriac -- 8 years of schooling, plus n years of residency and another n years of practice experience differentiate you from the MD.
This isn't exactly a new problem. People have books full of diseases and stuff that can convince them they're about to die.
Loads of people in England have books like these which are ideal for the budding hypochondriac! A lot of them are full of flow charts that let you start out with a symptom and answer questions to find out what disease you've got. You can start out with a slight headache and be dying of diphtheria before you know it!
So basically, the problem isn't really limited to the internet, but maybe it's easier to surf the net than to crack open a book when you feel ill.
The worst of it is that you *never* see people that just think that one particular form of alternative medicine might have some value, which would indicate that they're at least being rational. Say, maybe, acupuncture for pain relief. No, if acupuncture is useful, then they're certain that there has to be something in various herbal medicines and magnet healing has to also be useful.
It's really amazing how fraud is illegal, but alternative medicine gets a special pass -- and medicine is an area where one would think that we *should* have some form of tough regulation.
May we never see th
What the doctor was trying to do was treat your son's poison ivy by attacking the mechanism by which it is mediated.
You DID know that poison ivy is a hypersensitivity reaction, didn't you? Your own immune system causes the rash and symptoms. The rash of Poison Ivy is caused by a delayed, type IV hypersensitivity reaction (cell-mediated) to the oil of one of several species in the Toxicodendron genus. There is no way to treat poison ivy, except to temporarily suppress that particular immune response, often with steroids or other drugs. Then again, you could just wait... as you discovered. Poison ivy goes away if you give it enough time... but I can't tell you the number of people I see who demand that I do something about their symptoms right now.
If your son had a bad enough case that he was sent to a dermatologist, then your doctor may have been right on the money.
You have every right to do what you did... but don't accuse your doctor of malpractice; you're indicting him on an issue you clearly don't understand. You are exactly the type of person they are referring to in this article.
Then again, if we didn't have AC's talking smack, this wouldn't be slashdot.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
It's not so much that it's about diseases that most people haven't heard of. It's more that they're about diseases which are very similar to common maladies, although more intense. Migraines, acid reflux disease, depression, and social anxiety disorder are all "worse" forms of headaches, heartburn, sadness, and stress.
I'm not saying that migraine, acid reflux disease, depression, and social anxiety disorder aren't serious diseases, but because of their similarities to far less serious but more common problems, the hypochondriacs will come out in droves.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
I'm not sure what the article is implying. Are they saying that it would be better if people were medically ignorant so that they couldn't talk themselves into having horrible diseases?
Sorry, but I don't buy that. People with anxiety disorders always could go to the library or worry about something else.
But there is real and useful medical information on the Internet. If you worry about your risk of HIV after a sexual encounter, for example, you can find data quickly that lets you assess your risk rationally on the Internet, and that may well reduce more people's anxiety than increase it; in the past, you might have had to go to the library and go through stacks for many hours to find a simple answer, something most non-hypochondriacs would never have bothered with.
Furthermore, doctors themselves are so prone to making mistakes that having access to such a wealth of medical information on the Internet can actually save your life. I think doctors are quite unhappy that they are losing the information monopoly they traditionally enjoyed. Patients are now questioning their judgement, pointing out their mistakes, and generally are more informed. Perhaps that is the real reason why the medical community keeps raising this non-issue.
Ok -- I just have to point this out. It seems obvious, and I don't see why it hasn't been commented on already.
Doctors have access to all of these medical databases, too.
Now, I'm not saying that there are no idiot doctors. I'm sure that there are plenty of idiot doctors. I'm sure that there are plenty a greedy doctors. And greedy insurance plans. But really, if you go onto a health site, and I'm all in favor of everyone fully informing themselves, you're not getting exclusive information that isn't already at the fingertips of everyone in the health community. It's not like doctors memorize all of the common health conditions and screw you if you get something that's not in the top-100 list of human diseases.
A good doctor will examine you completely, run any indicated tests, and if your symptoms aren't entirely consistent with a common disease, (s)he'll refer you to someone called a specialist. This person, if also unable to diagnose your condition, really ought to refer to a researcher. If this isn't happening, that's a clue that you have a sucky doctor.
Upstairs Dog, Downstairs People.
This may be a problem with some web-assisted self-diagnosers and medical students. Unfortunately, the typical physician has exactly the opposite problem! If you are unfortunate enough to actually have a rare condition, you will commonly be misdiagnosed for years, sometimes to your great harm, even if your symptoms are a perfect fit for said condition. The smart patient will do research and bring it to his doctor's attention. And if he is not a pompous ass, he will pay attention to it.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.