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."
Maybe this is due to the growth in the Pharmaceutical industry in the United States. With advertisements on TV for drugs to cure diseases people haven't even heard of, its logical that consumers will respond. The wealth of information that is available on the internet is mind boggling to most, and I was not surprised to hear about this.
You don't have to be a hypochondriac to experience it. It's also known as medical students' syndrome, where perfectly normal and reasonable medical students self-diagnose themselves with diseases and illnesses that they are studying about. It's also been known as psychology students' syndrome for obvious reasons.
This sort of thing is stumping doctors.
A patient walks in and immediately tells the doctor he thinks he has Berringer-Klopp syndrome. The doctor then excuses himself for a moment and has to dig up one of those rare diseases books. A few minutes later, he tells the man that he probably just has a case of warts.
That's the problem with Medical school students as well; people will immediately think of the rarest diseases. It's probably just a cold or a early flu, but people suspect that they have a case of Tularemia. It's the equivalent of hearing hoofbeats and thinking that its Zebras.
I think most hypochondriacs try to avoid seeing doctors because doctors won't give creedence to their personal opinions about what they think they have. It seems most of them (hypochondriacs, not doctors) are more looking for sympathy than an actual solution to whatever perceived problem they might have.
Doctors vists are a great way to get piece of mind, which IMO is well worth the cost/hassle.
While this is true, I do not trust a doctor to not make mistakes. For instance, my reading online has caused friction between myself and a doctor I used to visit. He gave me a presciption, I looked it up online, found the dosage he gave me was far smaller than anything I had seen written. Upon asking him about it, he advised not reading websites when it comes to drugs. What about the drug company's website? What if you are curious how the drug works or how it was tested before coming to the market? How about the LD50 and side effects in animal testing? What about alternative medications? Ah yes, the doctor isn't making a profit if he's not pushing sheepish patients out the door as quickly as possible, with no questions.
I will tend to take a doctor's advice, but no doctor's opinion is absolute. I would like to know why he chose a particular drug and dosage. I would also like to know some things about the medication that most people would prefer not to think about. While I wish I could find myself in a stupor of feeling comfort in what other people tell me, I can not escape the need to verify information given to me from multiple sources.
I'm not sure I agree with that either. I think most hypochondriacs would prefer a certified medical treatment (a pill, some chemotherapy, whatever) that would convince them that they are cured from whatever illness they imagine themselves suffering from rather than sympathy. I mean, surely part of the problem -- from the hypochondriac's point of view -- is that not only are they sick, really, really sick with some -- probably -- life-threatening disease, but their doctor(s) is/are refusing to acknowledge that 'fact' and no treatment will therefore be received?! Sympathy be damned: what a hypochondriac wants is some surgery and a whole lotta pills!
Finally, and parenthetically, I don't think the Internet has managed to add very much to the hypochondriacs' lament. Jerome K. Jerome published his Three Men In A Boat some 100 years ago: in it the narrator J. comes across a medical textbook and manages to persuade himself that he suffers from every ailment in the book (quite literarily) save housemaid's knee. Upon seeing his doctor he receives the following prescription:
Which only shows that it was perfectly possible to be struck by hypochondria even without the use of electronics. Now, if only every hypochondriac were to receive such sensible advice.
The liver is evil and must be punished.
For people that do have rare disorders left undiagnosed, however, the Internet is an incredible boon.
I discovered after 21 years of operations with organ difficulties of all kinds that my birth defects had a name, that there was a great support network online, and wonderful new treatments. Nobody had ever told me what it was, because doctors focused on one malfunctioning organ at a time. I only learned because I was bored one night and typed the name of a procedure into a search engine. I learned about a new operation in the discussion groups about two years later, went through 6 layers of doctors to convince my HMO to let me have it -- and now for the first time in my life, I can go away from my house overnight, I don't have to worry about medical mishaps, it's amazing! All because *I* looked up info on what I had, instead of relying on authority figures that (all the way until I reached a surgeon) had never even *heard* of what I needed.
Similarly, it was a couple of years ago that I was searching for information on my delayed development/maturity and for the first time in my life found out what it was I'd had all along. I was skeptical at first, but I did fit the exact profile and asked others that were diagnosed in the online support community, eventually finding that I was more like them than anybody I'd ever met in real life. I've since been formally diagnosed, as has my partner (who went through the same self-dx process) though we learned in the process that the amount of ignorance in the psychology field when it comes to our neuro-issue is absolutely horrifying. This is after we'd each spent quite a bit of time being grossly misdiagnosed and drugged senseless based on that -- it was due to *our* research that we were finally given a diagnosis that made sense and were able to obtain guidance that improved our lives instead of making things worse.
Piece of mind through frequent physician visits costs money. Take it from a self-diagnosed :-P hypochondriac. If you want to reduce the number of "cyberchondriacs" out there:
DON'T just put out symptom lists, also put out comprehensive anti-symptom lists
DON'T tout statistical inprobability as likelyhood of having or not having a disease, since statistics don't show YOUR chances of having a disease they only show the amount of people out of a sampled set who have the disease (don't even get me started on other misinterpretations of statistics)
DO provide an open forum for discussion with doctors specializing in the field online, to allow people who still have questions to post them in a channel where they won't break the bank
And as far as the frequent doctors visits, I don't think it would be half as big a deal if there was just some way to just talk to a MD over the phone or something. I personally hate going to see doctors. But as far as I'm concerned, when my body tells me I'm feeling horrible (whether misconceived or otherwise) I go to a doctor to get answers.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF