We live in an age where health-related information is just one click away. One can search up any symptom they have and be overrun by an influx of possible illnesses that they could be suffering from. While this may sound like it saves lives by creating awareness about possible medical threats - and it does - it could also have several negative impacts on the unsuspecting user. For example, one could search up what an inexplicable symptom they are having could indicate, discovering on a website that it is a symptom of having a cancerous brain tumor when it could just be a benign migraine. In reality, very few cancerous tumors have headaches as a symptom. These google gaffes, or inaccurate medical information found online, will then result in excessive panicking and anxiety in the person.
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This scenario is one of the main reasons many people in our technology-consumed world suffer from a condition called cyberchondria, which is health anxiety that is exacerbated by repeated online searching. Cyberchondriacs are anxious about having an illness, and hence go on a marathon of Google searches to try and alleviate the anxiety. Unfortunately, however, this just ends up making their anxiety worse. The word ‘cyberchondria’ is a play on the term ‘hypochondria’, which is what health anxiety is referred to as.
Contrary to popular belief, cyberchondria is not the same as health anxiety. Although cyberchondria and health anxiety are very closely related, there is one major difference between the two. While health anxiety is an obsessive and irrational worry about having a serious medical condition, cyberchondriacs amplify the said anxiety by conducting constant health-related searches online. Both of them are worsened by google gaffes, which are becoming more and more prevalent online as people take advantage of others’ anxiety.
While it may be difficult to notice initially, there are many factors that both introduce and maintain cyberchondria in an individual. These factors can be divided into two categories: associated factors and anxiety-amplifying factors, both of which largely involve google gaffes. There are a few primary associated factors, the first one being the inability to tolerate uncertainty. In a nutshell, when a person has a symptom they don’t know the cause of, they search about it online, being unable to tolerate the uncertainty of not knowing while waiting till they see the doctor. However, they come across google gaffes, vast arrays of information with huge discrepancies in the severity of the illnesses they describe and low credibility, which are present in blogs, forums, government websites, and health organizations. They could all be indicating different illnesses or a lack of them, thereby confusing the person and causing them to search even more to arrive at a sort of ‘closure’. Similarly, due to the astronomical amount of information available on the Internet, some people may think that it has the answer to ‘everything’. This could consequently result in cyberchondriacs’ persistent Google searches until they find the ‘perfect’ cause of their symptoms.
There are some anxiety-amplifying factors that are associated with health anxiety as well as cyberchondria. Firstly, there are millions of websites in existence, some more credible than others. Unfortunately, it may be challenging to distinguish between them due to the presence of google gaffes. As a result, cyberchondriacs may treat information from less credible websites with the same weight as that from more believable ones. This will escalate their anxiety if there is a disparity in the information obtained. Moreover, one may not realize that the internet is not as reliable as a diagnosis by a physician due to the difference in the content of websites online where the information on some websites is wrong. This results in continued compulsive searches, which consequently, worsens their anxiety, and maintains cyberchondria.
Although few clinical-scale studies have been conducted on the topic of cyberchondria, in 2014, McElroy and Shelvin developed the first multidimensional assessment of cyberchondria - the Cyberchondria Severity Scale (CSS). The CSS is made up of 33 items that give a total score that indicates how severely one is suffering from cyberchondria. The key dimensions of this scale are compulsion, distress, excessiveness, reassurance, and mistrust of medical professionals. However, the CSS has not been wholly accepted by the scientific community as further research is still being conducted.
Cyberchondria is an intriguing instance of the role technology plays in impacting our psychological health. Research on cyberchondria is still in its infancy; there isn’t a complete acceptance of the concept and the only tool to measure it at the moment is the CSS. Cyberchondria is made exponentially worse in an individual due to the presence of google gaffes - intentional or unintentional misinformation easily accessible online. Awareness needs to spread about this condition and resources need to be made available that can help alleviate cyberchondriacs’ anxiety and encourage them to seek professional help. Searching for websites made by the government or health organizations might still not provide an accurate diagnosis as online algorithms cannot account for details about personal life. The best solution, therefore, is to go to a medical professional outside your house, off of your screen.
Written by Pragya Iyer
References:
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