Legal Research

The Perils of Self-Diagnosis via the Web

A recent study by Microsoft Research reports on the perils of cyberchondria, which the study defines as “the unfounded escalation of concerns about common symptomatology”, e.g. assuming the worst while attempting to diagnose your own health problems by searching the Web.

The purpose of the study was to add features to the Microsoft search engine that would give more reliable answers to a health-related search and to not lead the searcher to assume the worst. Presently, the study found, searches for headache or chest pain were just as likely or more likely to lead the searcher to medical pages describing serious conditions rather than to pages describing much less serious reasons for the symptom. 

Eric Horvitz, an artificial intelligencer researcher who worked on the study, was quoted in a New York Times article about the study, “People tend to look at just the first couple results. If they find ‘brain tumor’ or ‘A.L.S’ that’s their launching point.” The Times article also reported that the researchers attributed a Web searcher’s tendency to jump to a dire conclusion about the nature of his health problem to  normal human behavior.

Most health-related websites that I consider reputable will have a disclaimer somewhere on the site cautioning people not to use the information on the site for self-diagnosis and to be sure to consult their own physician about their symptoms. According to the Microsoft study, I guess many Internet searchers are not reading this disclaimer or are not paying any attention to it. Speaking for myself, I must admit that I do use the Internet for self-diagnosis but I do not jump to the worst conclusion and I do consult with my doctor, if I feel that I should. That might be due to my previous life as a Medical Technologist in a hospital Blood Bank and a moderate familiarity with health-related issues. In the introduction to the study, the Microsoft researches said that “the Web has the potential to increase the anxieties of people who have little or no medical training”. But also speaking for myself, I cannot think of anyone that I know who has diagnosed himself with something bad just by searching the Internet. Whether that is happening as often as the study seems to indicate, I don’t know. I just hope that the ultimate outcome of the study is to make the individuals who put up health-related websites aware of the phenomenon, and to encourage those individuals (like Microsoft) who design Internet search engines to keep this phenomenon in mind so that everyone with a headache is not running around thinking he has a brain tumor.

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on December 15, 2008 (boomark / email).