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.
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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.