Cyberchondria: Do Online Health Searches Prompt Symptoms (and Worse)? | Mary Aiken

Cyberchondria: Do Online Health Searches Prompt Symptoms (and Worse)?

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1% of all Google searches are health queries. Cyberpsychologist Mary Aiken explains how artificial intelligence diagnostics lead to psychosomatic symptoms, and potentially explain the fourfold increase in iatrogenic death in the US since 1999. The internet is full of information. It is a data piñata so stuffed that if you hit it, your baseball bat would split in two. But remember that old adage about quality vs. quantity? It’s never been more relevant than now, in the age of digital health searches and rampant self-diagnosis.

Way back when, by which we mean less than 20 years ago, if you had a strange rash or a suspicious lump or a pain, you either had to visit a real doctor, pluck up the courage to ask a friend or relative, go to the library in disguise, or die in silence and shame.

Most people seeking answers then were genuinely sick, but some would have been hypochondriacs. The condition, described as abnormal anxiety about one’s health and imagined illness (even to the point of psychosomatic symptoms), has been around for centuries, and recently it has grown a new branch: cyberchondria. "Before the internet, it was called medical student's disease," says Dr. Aaron Krasnow, associate vice president of Arizona State University’s Counseling Services and Health Services, in an interview with The State News. "The thing about medical students is that they learn about so many diseases and disorders, they start to think they have them… The internet is filled with an enormous amount of fantastic information. It is also filled with an enormous amount of terrible information. One of the things the internet does poorly is filter the information."

The more people click on a certain search result, the higher it rises in the ranks. Mark Aiken, forensic psychologist, and director of the Cyberpsychology Research Network explains why you may have a headache but end up reading about a brain tumor. "There’s a very good reason behind it. Humans have a propensity to escalate, to review the worst possible scenario – probably to dismiss it. … If you went to your doctor and you said, ‘I have a terrible headache,' and your doctor said, ‘Well, you could have anything from a hangover to a brain tumor.’ You would say, ‘Oh my goodness, talk to me about the brain tumor.’ And essentially that’s what happens online. People click on the worst-case scenario and therefore those scenarios get driven up the search rankings."

These frequency-based search models are fantastic if you want to know where to eat in Texas, but they are devastating when it comes to health queries. Intuitive diagnostic websites can actually have negative health impacts, escalating and prompting symptoms, leading a person to imagine feelings that aren’t there and rushing to the doctor with a cluster of symptoms that mimic a real disease. The doctor has a responsibility to refer you to the next medical stage for testing and diagnostics and potentially risky investigative procedures.

A recent report published in the BMJ states that iatrogenic death – a catchall term for problems with taking medication, medical error, infection, or death by accident within the medical system – is the third cause of death in the USA. Noting that correlation does not imply causation, Aiken notes an interesting trend: iatrogenic death has increased fourfold between 1999 and 2011 and actually shadows the growth of the internet. Perhaps cyberchondria is a more serious problem than we all thought.

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MARY AIKEN:

Mary Aiken specializes in the impact of technology on human behaviour, and has written extensively on issues relating to the intersection between humankind and technology — or as she describes it "where humans and technology collide." She appears regularly on radio and television and frequently gives talks to the public and private sector on an international basis. Dr. Mary Aiken is an Adjunct Associate Professor at University College Dublin, Geary Institute for Public Policy, and Academic Advisor (Psychology) to the European Cyber Crime Centre (EC3) at Europol. She is a lecturer in Criminology and Research Fellow at the School of Law, Middlesex University, a Fellow of the Society for Chartered IT Professionals, a Sensemaking Fellow at the IBM Network Science Research Centre, and Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Cyber Analytics at AIRS Hawaii Pacific University.

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