VickyC.me

The internet is amazing, think of how the use of the internet has changed our lives in just the last 10 years. We’ve gone from merely sending e-mails to things like Skype, reading the news, watching movies and tv, finding out pretty much anything and everything you can think of with the click of a mouse! But now, when we’re sick or don’t feel well, the first thing we do is hit the internet and Google our symptoms.

This is great if you know that you have a sinus infection, so that you know whether or not you’re contagious, what you need to take and how you need to treat yourself in order to get better again..

But if you wake up one morning with a headache, and decide Google headache types, you’ll see “brain tumor” in the related searches section. So then, you start looking up “brain tumor symptoms” and you find that you have a few of them – maybe weakness, you’re lethargic and have trouble concentrating. And boom! After just a few clicks, you’ve managed to convince yourself that you have a brain tumor. So in a complete panic, you decide to go to the doctor, you demand that he give you an MRI and you want a referral to see a neurologist.

But then it turns out all you need is a new pair of glasses because you can’t see too good and the strain on your eyes is giving you a major headache. And maybe the weakness and trouble concentrating is because you’re overexerting yourself at work.

I mean, obviously its better to be safe than sorry, but there is a very fine line between being cautious and turning into a super-extra hypochondriac. But think of how many sites there are out there that help you self diagnose yourself: WebMD, YourDiagnosis, FamilyDoctor, SymptomDiagnosis, etc, etc… Do you think these online medical diagnosis sites are good or bad? Are they useful? Have you used them? Personally, I prefer going to talk to a pharmacist, so that I don’t have to wait for 16 hours in the doctors office – unless I REALLY need to.

Check out these stupid health stories that I found across the web from this week

Tags: Diagnosis, Doctor, Google, Health, Hypochondriac, Hypochondriacs, Illness, Internet, Medical, Mis-diagnosis, Online, Search, Self Diagnosis, Symptom, Treatment, Wrong Diagnosis

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 9th, 2010 at 7:22 pm and is filed under Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.