The Web can make you sick
Posted by: Barbara Bibel
As more people turn to the Web to find health and medical information, a new ailment has emerged: Cyberchondria. An article in the Washington Post on November 10th defined this condition as “baseless fueling of fears and anxiety about common health symptoms due to Internet research, or …Googling oneself into a state of absolute clinical hysteria over every last pain, itch, and strange freckle on your body.” It used to be called First year Medical Student’s Disease, thinking that one has every disease in the internal medicine textbook. In fact, it points out a very real problem that librarians can remedy. Using Google to find health information, especially if one does not know how to search and evaluate the information retrieved, is a very bad idea. People put in common terms such as “chest pain” , get lots of material about heart disease, and assume that they are having a heart attack. The fact that they are 25 years old, in good shape, and have no cardiac risk factors makes that unlikely, but Google does not reason, take a medical history, or do a physical examination. It ranks sites by what it considers relevant and by the number of hits that they get, so Dr. X’s miracle cure may be the first site that an anxious person finds. If that person were to come to the library and seek out a reference librarian, he or she could learn about MedlinePlus and other reliable sites to use. The librarian would also tell him/her that the Web is not a substitute for a physician. So, take two clicks and call your local reference desk in the morning!
