Cyberchondira – Are you affected as well?

The hypothesis goes like this; you wake up in the morning with a severe headache and before consulting a doctor, the first thing you do is search for it on the web. If you find out that you may have brain tumor then you are quite likely suffering from a disease called Cyberchondria.

Microsoft researchers, on Monday published the results of a study of health related web searches on popular search engines as well as a survey of the company employees. The study concludes that the self-diagnosis by search engine frequently leads web-searchers to conclude the worst about what ails them.

The term ‘Cyberchondria’ emerged in 2000 referring to the practice of leaping to dire conclusions while researching health matters online. Microsoft conducted this study as part of its effort to add features to Microsoft’s search service that could make it more of an advisor and less of blind information retrieval tool.

Mr. Horvitz, an artificial intelligence researcher at Microsoft Research, said many people treated search engine as if they could answer questions like a human expert. “People tend to look at just the first couple results,” He said, “If they find brain tumor or A.L.S., that’s their launching point.” Mr. Horvitz is not only a computer scientist but he also has a medical degree.

According to Mr. Horvitz and his fellow investigator, Rven W. White who is a specialist in information retrieval technology, Microsoft study is the first systematic look at anxieties of people doing searches related to health care. They found out that although web search for a specific symptom will give out many results linked to it but most of the times, the search leads people to the more serious illnesses than the benign ones.

The researchers said that their study does not intend to stop people from searching for their symptoms on the web search engines. They however, do believe that their examination of search records indicate that researching particular symptom often leads very quickly to anxiousness. So, next time you have that painful cramp in your stomach or a constant cough, try not to deduce the ailment without prior physician’s consultation or else, you will be yet another victim of the disease called cyberchondria.