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Microsoft Researchers Study "Cyberchondria"
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."
Cyberchondria Wikia - A variant of Cyberchondria in which symptoms, causes and diseases change at random when suggested by other users
The problem might not be the use of the internet for information, so much as how people are going about getting and using that information. Just like one wouldn't trust some random person off the street or even some unknown doctor-like person in a white coat walking down the hall at the hospital, one can't blindly trust information on the internet. Getting a second opinion, (and a third, and a fourth) might help people to get a better idea of what's truly happening. They should still talk to a doctor, rather than relying solely on their internet diagnosis, but they might be able to at least get a general idea of what might be wrong. Using medical information on the web as one's only source is irresponsible; it should be common sense to get a balanced opinion and also to see a real medical professional.
Deuteranopia, Pectus excavatum, and Autosarcophagy.
-=/\- Jizzbug -/\=-
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.
OK, so now we have a word that is the same as another, with a slightly different definition. Instead of people freaking out about imagined illnesses, now they have the ability to get online and find other illnesses that they didn't realize they had... Fantastic. Irritating doesn't even begin to describe my feeling about this one.
"The only constant in the universe is change." - Unknown author
This means I've just found another condition I might have by browsing the internet! Damn you cyberchondria!
Trust me, kids; don't drink and post.
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."
In my anecdotal and limited experience, I've noticed that it is certain personality types which have a "propensity to jump to awful conclusions".
They basically resort to hysterics over things they cannot control, even before they know how [thing] is going to end.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Several years ago, I noticed something about a patch of skin. I looked it up and asked the dermatologist about it. He, of course, ignored me and the question.
Three diagnoses, two prescriptions and 7 office visits later, he consulted with several doctors around the country.
I had been right from the get go, though he would never admit it.
I haven't RTFA, per usual, but I'm sure the study concludes that it's a great idea to search the Internet to see if you have a terrible disease using Windows Live Search.
We (myself and a couple of doctors) started MEDgle (http://www.medgle.com/ ) specifically to help people understand the possible causes for their symptoms. Hopefully this will help combat cyberchondria by giving people reasonable causes, not the most dire. And as you stated, people should always talk with their health care provider. Any feedback is much appreciated. Cheers
So you are color blind, you have a malformed chest and you cannibalize your own flesh... A rare combination indeed.
Pic related:
http://joshuahoffine.wordpress.com/2008/07/24/making-isolation/
-=/\- Jizzbug -/\=-
"...it hurts when I go like this!
This ain't rocket surgery.
The web hasn't made this behavior any less prevalent, it's just made it easier for people to fall into the trap. There are two camps in the medical community right now; Those who think that medical knowledge should be contained to those who are properly licensed, and those who think knowledge is power (but hope people use it responsibly). If this sounds familiar, it should -- our community (the technical and engineering disciplines) have had the same debate. We've all had our share of "technocondriacs" -- people who insist there's something wrong with their computer, even when we've scanned it with everything, reloaded the operating system, and defragged the drive five times... They somehow think it should run faster, or that there's a button somewhere to do X when there's never been X in that application. And no sniggering about literacy or operating system of choice here -- it happens to users of all backgrounds.
One example is pharmaceutical advertisements. Five years ago, using the words "Erectile Dysfunction" would have left people giggling on the floor. These days, it gets an eye roll and a remembrance of those commercials. It's undisputed some people have a problem rising to the challenge and may not have known there was a treatment for it, but the unintended consequence is a lot of people are taking medications that aren't medically necessary because of self-esteem problems, obesity, or a plethora of other causes that can be treated without a pill. Which of course leads to the "Solve everything with a pill" attitude that our society seems to enjoy, but that's a topic for another day.
I have to side with the idea that knowledge should be out there. My friend just got a horrible ear infection that resulted in extreme pain and puss coming out of her ear because the doctor misdiagnosed it as "swimmers ear"; She needed strong antibiotics and he prescribed drops, and so for three days she's been laid out on a couch screaming and crying every few minutes. She only went back to ER after researching out what else it could be besides swimmers ear, and an ear infection turned up -- there was no difference in the symptoms list, except the pain level. And her mother is a registered nurse who works in a hospital -- she didn't find anything wrong with the diagnosis either. My friend's access to the internet may very well have just saved her some hearing loss this week!
So which side is right? Both. And neither.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
That stuff makes me sick, I'm telling you!
There's a similar phenomenon in psychology when students take their first abnormal psychology class. If you don't want to be (half-jokingly) diagnosed with any number of mental disorders, you want to temporarily avoid a psychology student who has just started to read the DSM!
Yeah this sounds like classic zebra syndrome.
Zebra Syndrome is immediately jumping to the rare possibility when given a piece of evidence. When you hear hoofbeats you should think "horses", not zebras.
Someone gets an ache or pain and hops on Google and suddenly they have Schistosomiasis or something else equally as absurd.
...this is a variant of age-old authoritarianism which comes down to ridiculing the layman for trying to be aware and take care of the affairs normally reserved for a "pro".
I've known one person - already suffering from a mental illness which would likely cause the described symptoms - who has panicked from reading medical sites and attempting self-diagnosis. Everyone else I know seems perfectly capable of observing that people aren't regularly collapsing in the street, and while certain symptoms warrant a quick elimination of serious cause, a diagnostic test is likely to result in good news.
Unfortunately - and particularly under the UK's NHS - it's often the patient rather than the doctor that needs to express that the odds may be low, but not so low that, say, an MRI isn't warranted. For certain conditions, good diagnostic testing also enables the right treatment to be chosen.
If you don't want to offend your ego-sensitive doctor, express your thoughts as questions: "I'm trying to understand more about my body. Can you explain why it would not be X, say, or Y?" A primary care practitioner/GP is partly an applied statistician, so if you have a maths/science background, you might also get a lot of interesting information.
A few years ago, I woke up with a terrible pain in my lower abdomen. I did a quick Google search and matched all the symptoms of appendicitis, so I got my parents to take me to the hospital.
The first doctor also thought that I had it and scheduled me for surgery. However, the surgeon said to wait for a while.
Turns out that it wasn't appendicitis and that I just had to fart really, really, really badly. Of course, 24hrs in the hospital to figure it out probably makes it the most expensive fart ever -- something around $5,000.
So yes, this "cyberchondria" really is a problem.
So I looked up "Porn Addict" on WebMD, you know - to do research for a paper I'm writing - and got to a page there which included a brief Flash video of me behind my keyboard, typing in "Porn Addict" on WebMD. Jesus, this technology is AMAZING.
This'll probably sound trollish, but it's a true story:
One day while I was... uh.. taking care of business... I noticed something was a little off. Mostly because that activity shouldn't be painful.
A few web searches later (and I'm talking days and days of web-based research), I was quite convinced that I'd suddenly had my first herpes outbreak. The symptoms lined up: Blistering, redness, soreness, painful ulcers, the whole lot. After it didn't go away (and some of the denial wore off) I saw my doctor.
"I think this is herpes," he said to me.
A couple of standard tests and a bottle of Valtrex later, I lacked a conclusive diagnosis.
After waiting three months for a referral to a dermatologist (they really do take forever, we need more of them), I went through months of excruciating morning wood with what felt like an endless herpes outbreak (cause I frequently wake up laying on my stomach) to have the dermatologist look at it for about 20 seconds before he finally diagnosed Lichen Planus.
In my personal experience though, my web-based self diagnosis was just as good as the one a real doctor had had before real tests were done.
On a side note, at least I know I don't have any herpes virus, or hep C.
Cheers.
The condition is common in med students who seem to get sick with whatever conditions they've recently studied.
Because doctors know that people can often search for stuff like this on the internet, many medical professionals will IMMEDIATE ignore any and all such comments or queries. I've come to three doctors now with information I found in medical journals and on the internet which match my symptoms (migraines, blackouts, audio and visual hallucinations, seizures, fugue states... basically, every facet of certain kinds of epilepsy). All three doctors have told me, in various ways, that since I found this information myself, it's clearly NOT what I have.
I continue to have blackouts and seizures, and continue to go untreated, because unless I have a seizure in my doctor's office, he'll just assume I'm trying to get medication out of him.
I call it "Smug Superioritis".
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
That's the general term I'm used to for medical, psychological and similar self-induced symptom anxiety. TFA is just a blatant attempt to claim a piece of it for themselves, when the cause is the same whether it's internet based or Babylonian cuniform on clay tablets.
The source of the discomfort is plain old cognitive dissonance. Some people are more prone to it than others, for a number of reasons. They're the same ones who intend to relieve the anxiety by learning what they can about why they don't feel well. But being prone to the dissonance, they instead find a rationale for the anxiety that's worse than any real cause, and it backfires and they fall into a feedback loop.
In psychological and psychiatric training, it's more common for the symptomitis sufferer to diagnose their relatives than themselves.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Most people -- including, I suspect, doctors -- have trouble with critical thinking, and one area that tends to be a particular problem is critical thinking about probabilities and cause-and-effect relationships. I'm a community college professor in California, and recently there was a big state-wide earthquake drill, which they made into sort of a media event. The day before, I heard my students before class talking about it. "There's gonna be an earthquake tomorrow at 10 o'clock." "Huh? They can't predict earthquakes, can they?" "I heard it on the news." "Really?" Most people just accept information without thinking about it critically. Obama won't say the pledge of allegiance? Oh, okay.
I don't think medicine is different from any other field where people gather their own information, and I don't think health-care professionals are always much better than anyone else at this kind of thing. For example, I had a certain foot problem, and my G.P. prescribed physical therapy. One of the things the physical therapist did was to use ultrasound on my feet (therapeutic ultrasound, not ultrasound for imaging). I checked on the web later, and it turned out that the only controlled scientific studies on the topic had shown that ultrasound had no effect on my condition.
I think it's telling that "evidence-based medicine" is a term that even needs to be used. If it's not evidence-based, what's it based on? Wishful thinking? Voodoo? The placebo effect?
Find free books.
on a person thinking they have a disease, syndrome or condition - or talent or acumen for that matter - based on bits of random information collected without the benefit of knowledge or training. There. Everyone now owes me money.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
Does anyone else find it mildly encouraging that the Internet is bringing the general population up to the level of second-year medical students?
Ray Kurzweil is smiling somewhere.
My Mom has done the same thing with a medical encyclopedia for years. She looks things up and decides she has them.
You might want to look at the table on page 10: "Symptoms, Explanations, and Serious Illnesses." The "virtual doctor" has been around like forever - page through almost any back issue of Byte or Creative Computing - if you want to try a sampling FreeMD is a good a place as any to begin. Personally I prefer my HMO's help line nurses, who are on-call 24 hours a day, toll-free.
They should be after the NXE bugs, not chasing baskets full of shit like this. http://forums.xbox.com/24355681/ShowPost.aspx
IANAD, but I know several personally, and also from trips to the GP. From what I gather, they quite like that a patient researches the symptoms and mentions this to the Dr. They don't like a patient coming in and saying, "Doctor, I have this illness and require this medication." Self diagnosis is a useful tool for any medical practitioner, but self medication can always be dangerous. A profesional opinion is something that can't be read or learned on the internet.
A side note, I had dinner with a couple last night who are medical doctors and have been practicing for over 30 years. I asked the question, "What when either of you are ill, do you diagnose each other, yourselves, or what?" They replied that they may well see an out-of-town doctor. Reason being is that if they diagnose themselves or each other there will always be some bias. If they see a colleague who works in the same practice as them, the colleague would know their private business.
If you conclude the worst, and you have the disease you might go and seek medical help sooner. If it turns out you're right, you might catch your disease in time to have something about it.
The other thing to note is that good medical care, even in the "developed" world is increasingly becoming hard to find. Doctors do long hours and are under immense pressure and the best and brightest sren't always attracted to the field, and when they are they often feel entitled to gouge the people they treat while providing sub-standard care. That's not to say there are no good doctors, just that there are surprisingly few. A good doctor will save you but a bad one will get you killed.
I've had friends and loved ones prescribed medications that almost killed them (and had dosage increased by 3 separate doctors in one case, as one of the contraindications got worse and worse!). I've seen routine things completely misdiagnosed. I've seen a woman with maternal asthma barely able to breath and hacking up huge amounts of flem dismissed as a fat hypochondriac. I've seen shoulder dislocations misdiagnosed as swelling - something that commonly happens resulting in long term should instability. (Don't believe me? Check out the literature on posterior shoulder dislocations and include "avoiding a missed diagnosis" in your search).
I've also been told I should have my ankle fused by 2 specialists. According to them I should no longer be walking, but when I looked up the long term prospects - after 3 months off my feet completely only a 70-80% chance of success (in which case repeat once then chop off foot) I can expect a couple of years recovering and about 6-7 years before severe ankle arthritis hits. I have gone for more conservative treatment - staying off the ankle - and while there is still pain I walk a couple of kilometers a day and haven't had to sacrifice my career. I may still have to have the surgery but these surgeons didn't even suggest TRYING anything conservative.
IF you use the internet appropriately instead of looking up ever sneeze and cough and assumign you are dying, the net is a wonderful thing. Anyone who says otherwise has a vested interest in keeping the information from you.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
If you need to coin new fake-Greek terms, they should at least make some sense.
...if you actually do have something badly wrong with you, online resources can be invaluable. They're particularly good when you have something wrong that's rare enough that your doctors don't know what it is, presents a variety of very common symptoms, and you happen to be reasonably intelligent. Online resources can be incredibly valuable in getting an idea of what might be wrong with you, at least to know where to start looking.
In my case, I had a chronic disease for eight years that doctors proved completely unable to diagnose. Not only that, they couldn't even get me to the right specialist. Finally, after years of putting up with that, I started searching myself for a specific set of symptom combinations that are rather rare for my demographic.
As it turns out, I was able to do with google and effort that which a bunch of doctors and tests couldn't do: namely, figure out what was wrong with me. Sure, there were lots of scary things (cancers and whatnot) that I was able to easily eliminate because 1) I didn't have the right symptoms, and 2) I'd be dead by now if I had them. Eventually, I found one particular disease that matched all my symptoms.
And it's a good thing I did, because my particular illness causes chronic symptoms that eventually result in permanent damage. For me, there's no treatment but the damage can be avoided by changes in diet and such. Thankfully, the changes have worked extremely well. Without online resources, I'd probably still be bouncing from doctor to doctor, none of whom apparently have the time to do actual investigative research.
In an age in which doctors don't have time to be doctors, online resources can be invaluable. You just have to bear in mind that most of the scary syndromes described are usually very rare.
It's psychosomatic? That means I better take some antibiotics, right?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Good information isn't much better for hypercondria than bad. For a start, its very difficult for someone who isn't used to looking at the information format to be sure how to interpret it. I've dealt with people who are afraid they have $condition, because they show most of the symptoms, but simply neglect to look at the symptoms that don't fit, or aren't aware that 9 of the ten symptoms (which they have) don't mean a thing because the tenth is critical. Subjective ones, like major pain, or stiff neck (without qualifiers like unable to touch you chin to your chest), cause problems as well since its easy to get mild symptoms interpreted as worse than they really are in a panic (judgment is not terribly good when fatigue and fever are taking their toll).
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
A friend's vet told her her beloved cat needed to be killed because it had "advanced cancer." So she spent days on the Net searching on her cat's symptoms. She came across the suggestion that it could be a gluten allergy, fed the cat a gluten-free diet, and now six months later the cat is entirely healthy.
So ... go to the doctor first if it seems serious. But you're a damn fool if you accept a diagnosis or treatment without first doing your own research. Misdiagnosis - by doctors - is one of the leading causes of death.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I think I have Cyberchondria...
Hans Reiser thinks his wife had "Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy" and recently accused his lawyer of having oxytocin excess. Bram Cohen thinks he has Asperger's. I would guess that the vast majority of the people that say they or their children have Asperger's probably fall under Cyberchondria. The DSM-IV is great for this as it's just chock full of vague symptoms that are easily misinterpreted by people with no training.
Last year, I woke up and found that my eye was full of floaters and I was seeing flashes. I quickly checked for those symptoms using Google which led me to a page on Wikipedia describing the symptoms of a detached retina. I called my wife down from upstairs and told her we were going to the hospital. When a doctor checked my eye, I had indeed suffered a posterior vitreous detachment which had ripped several chunks of retina away. I was immediately treated with a laser and the doctor told me that if I hadn't been so prompt it is likely I would have gone blind in that eye. I have had to have several other surgeries (more laser treatment, vitrectomy and finally a membrane peel) and am on the road to recovery. I will likely get a cataract which will be treated by lens replacement but at least I can still see.
Of course, my symptoms were quite specific so I can understand people with quite general symptoms thinking they have cancer or something.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
This is such old news that one of my favourite books, Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome, has already covered it. Published in 1889, and required reading for anyone with a sense of humour.
Consciousness is a myth. Trust me.
Agree. I had mentioned in a previous post that information on the Internet can be rather useful. I do enjoy patients who do reserach beforehand, so they come prepared. Typically they will say, "Well, I know we're not supposed to believe everything on the Internet, but I looked on WebMD, and it said [such and such]." They list a few possibilities. They will also tell me what they're worrying about, such as "my uncle had my symptoms too, and he eventually died, so I looked up Cancer of the Oogali-Boogali gland" or whatever, and then I can address their concerns. One nice thing about such patients is that you can say, "I think it's [whatever]" and they're happy to go look up the details themselves, so you're not stuck spending an extra 5 minutes explaining what rhinovirus is and why it's not going to kill them.
What I hate, as you've alluded to, is patients who have checked the Internet and have already made up their minds about what to do. Of these patients, the ones that drive me nuts are the ones that don't even tell you what the problem is, just the test they want to do, like, "Morning, doctor. I need an ultrasound of the thyroid." Eventually further questioning reveals that they feel a lump in their throat and they're worried about hyperthyroidism (which does not cause a lump in the throat, and even if it did, is not diagnosed with an ultrasound). By taking a step back and identifying their concerns ("let's look at what other possible causes are of a lump in the throat") I get them to take a more rational and scientifically/medically correct approach (meaning that the sequence of tests is much more likely to yield a useful diagnosis), but it takes an extra 5-10 minutes, and I feel like strangling them as I wrap up the visit with a smile and say, "See you next time! Get well soon! (Now just let me deal with the next patient who has been kept waiting!)"
I was pleasantly surprised by the large proportion of my patients who are of the former type, reasonable people who gather info on the Internet but don't commit to believing it, just bringing it to me to sort through with them. I think the general population, or at least my own patient population, is becoming more mature with respect to how to deal with the large amount of info on the Internet.
Hardest to deal with of all is a subtle attitude on some of the patients who read info on the Internet and have their way of thinking swayed in a pervasive but subtle way. For example, people who refuse vaccinations because they've read about negative consequences of vaccination adverse effects are victims of the perceptive error that the probability of an event is proportional to how clearly it sticks in one's mind. Anecdotal evidence of one case where a vaccine caused someone to sprout horns and an extra pair of eyes doesn't mean that it's not preventing serious illness --and even death!-- not just for the patient but for those who would otherwise have been infected by the patient. But these people don't come in saying, "Gee, I read this thing on the Interet 3 years ago. Do you think I should get vaccinated?" They just say, "No, I'd rather not get the shot," and you're lefting wondering where they got the info on which they based their decision. Chances are it's from the Internet, from something that could have been debunked by snopes.com or something similar.
So, the Internet is a tool. It can be used wisely, or poorly, and for the latter group of patients, we doctors just have to suck it up and spend the extra hand-holding time trying to educate them on proper use of the Internet. Maybe this research on "cyberchondria" can be a tool in this effort.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
Online searching of medical information has been very good for me, health wise, and getting healthy wise.
You ever develop a propensity for syncope. Followed by waking up surrounded by passwerbys askign if your okay. ... you'll know what I mean.
Just like in Computer 101 -- GIGO. Usagi yo.
Did anyone else click the RSS link thinking the article would be about cybernetic mitochondria? That would have been much cooler.
About two years ago I started to have problems to sleep. It started mild but it became serious insomnia
Since that was not normal I started to research on the internet. The more I read the more horrible possible causes I found and the more worried I got. The more worried I got the worse I felt(It's really incredible what your state of mind can do to your "physical" body!)...go to step one. It was a vicious circle.
In the end I was diagnosed a depression with anxiety and that's what it was.
Obviously it was not the internet that caused my problems but reading about diseases didn't do me good.
It's good it all ended
Ah, now the "self-diagnosed Asperger's" crowd have one more reason to whine about the world not understanding them.
by Jerome K. Jerome, published 1889 (yes, I *did* say the 19th century). Somewhere in the first ten pages, Our Narrator goes to a library, and finds a medical textbook to find if he has a certain disease, and flips it open. By the time he's done, he thinks he has everything in the book (other than housemaid's knees).
Read the book. The first half is hysterical, and the last half a lyrical paen to the Themes Valley of England.
Yes, the Monty Python crew made a movie of it, but the book's still better.
mark
im an actual psychiatrist-diagnosed hypchondriac. every few months i get a new symptom that cant be explained...and despite my knowing full well its not a serious illness...i go into a fit of depression and anxiety thinking ive have the worst things imaginable until the symptoms fade away. then the worry goes away and im normal again. a cycle that happens every 3 to 5 months.
"cyberchondria" is a big deal to people like me. it makes it worse. i can speak from experience that looking symptoms up on the internet, finding a horrible disease that "mostly fits", and then latching onto it can actually make you mentally and physically ill. for instance:
these past 2 weeks, ive had a constant mild headache. also a little fatigued. did fine for the first 3 or 4 days...everyone keeps telling me its sinuses. then after day 4 i started looking up symptoms...BRAIN TUMOR. big time. i latched onto it and havent looked back. i cant eat, i cant sleep, i cant think straight. all of these things give me more symptoms, which makes it all worse. after reading about brain tumors, i started to develop seeing problems, though i couldnt explain them to you because they are so vague (because they dont exist). i started to feel dizziness....but i could never actually make myself dizzy when i tried (like spinning around really fast).
ive thought ive had other diseases, read what they "could be", and then the worrying starts and the worrying creates new symptoms. a lot of them are what ive read online.
in my life time, as a result of hypo/cyberchondria, ive had ultrasounds of my kidneys, a colonoscopy, 2 prostate checks, a million blood tests and a million more urine tests. ive "had" failing kidneys, bladder cancer, colon cancer, a brain tumor, throat cancer, testicular cancer, diabetes, penis cancer, multiple sclerosis...the list goes on..and some of these ive had more than once. the wierd thing is, im totally a normal person. all of these sounds like i should be in a mental hospital (one of my hypchondriac fears as well)...but if you met me you'd never know it. im a pretty regular guy.
so, this is my experience with cyberchondria. now for my 2 cents...i actually think the information should be available on the internet. its information like any other, and looking it up has uses other than unprofessional self-diagnoses. further more, as you can see i am proof that this information does harm...but thats not the fault of the information providers. thats my fault. like a lot of things in this world...its not the existence of something that makes it good or bad, its what we decide to do with it. i look this stuff up, i decide to jump to conclusions and i (more or less) decide to go ape shit over it. thats not WebMD's or MayClinic's fault. i think the only responsibility companies like these have is that the information is accurate. after that, if they WANT to, they can go a step further and include statistical information in the range of "brain tumors are rare and most headaches are brain tumors" to "in 2007, 20,076 cases of brain tumors were reported out of a population of 250,000,000".
i think its cool that M$ is looking into this and at least talks about wanting to do something about it (or rather about the behavior behind it as it relates to search engines). i mean cyberchondriacs are still a small percentage of the population (like most of the diseases they look up), but the fact they took any interest at all is a cool point on M$'s side.
I just did a search for "fever" on WebMD. Look at the results on the first page. Any wonder people invent crazy diseases?
Scarlet Fever
Typhoid Fever
Marburg Hemorrhagic Fever
Report: Fever Improves Autism Symptoms
Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever
While this is probably true, I have experienced the opposite. One night when I was sure I wasn't going to make it to the morning, I searched online and found a forum of a zillion people who described the exact same feeling and explained that they've been living with it for 50 years and they're still alive. That calmed me down and now I don't worry about it anymore.
not big fan Google myself, but something tells me this research has something (more likely: everything) to do with Google's "Google Health" service http://blogoscoped.com/files/google-health-login-large.png . I don't trust either monstrosity with my health, but usually results of MS studies that undermine competition are somewhat biased ;)
P.S. People who look for ways to prove they're sick will find those ways regardless of medium (nobody closed libraries... yet ).