On Monday, Microsoft researchers published the results of a study of health-related Web searches on the company's Live search engine as well as a survey of the company's employees. The study suggests that self-diagnosis by search engine frequently leads Web searchers to conclude the worst about what ails them.
The researchers said they had undertaken the study as part of an effort to add features to Microsoft's search service that could make it more of an adviser and less of a blind information retrieval tool. Although the term "cyberchondria" emerged in to refer to the practice of leaping to dire conclusions while researching health matters online, the Microsoft study is the first systematic look at the anxieties of people doing searches related to health care, Eric Horvitz said.
Horvitz, an artificial intelligence researcher at Microsoft Research, said many people treated search engines as if they could answer questions like a human expert. Horvitz is a computer scientist and has a medical degree, and his fellow investigator, Ryen W. White, is a specialist in information retrieval technology. They found that Web searches for things like headache and chest pain were just as likely or more likely to lead people to pages describing serious conditions as benign ones, even though the serious illnesses are much more rare.
For example, there were just as many results that linked headaches with brain tumors as with caffeine withdrawal, although the chance of having a brain tumor is infinitesimally small. The researchers said they had not intended their work to send the message that people should ignore symptoms. But their examination of search records indicated that researching particular symptoms often led quickly to anxiousness.
They found that roughly 2 percent of all Web queries were health-related, and about , users, or about a quarter of the sample, engaged in a least one medical search during the study. About a third of the subjects "escalated" their follow-up searches to explore serious illnesses, the researchers said. Of the more than 5, Microsoft employees who answered a survey on their medical search habits, more than half said that online medical queries related to a serious illness had interrupted their day-to-day activities at least once.
Horvitz said that in addition to his interest in creating a Web search tool that would give more reliable answers, the research was driven by clear memories from his medical school education of what was often referred to as "second-year syndrome" or "medical schoolitis. He said he remembered "sitting on a cold seat with my legs dangling off the examination table," convinced that he was suffering from a rare and incurable skin disease.
The intention of the researchers is not send the message that people should ignore symptoms but to point out that researching particular symptoms online often leads to additional anxiousness. Many reported that the results they received from their online medical queries had interrupted their day-to-day activities at least once. But I disagree with the researchers' notion that researching particular symptoms online often leads to additional anxiousness. For example, I accurately predicted the possibility of parathyroid cancer when I noticed that the levels of parathyroid hormone and calcium of an elderly relative of mine were too high.
I pointed this out to her endocrinologist who immediately ordered a nuclear scan. Cancer was detected and was removed. I consider cyberchondria a virtue rather than a disease. Quick reply. If you want to get notified by every reply to your post, please register.
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