The Internet—the Worst Doctor in the World

Nate A___, a perpetually ruddy-faced guy with a "rat tail" and a propensity for amazing hole shots (rubber-burning peel-outs with his truck, performed primarily in the high school parking lot), once remarked that your dear author was "smart, but he don't have no common sense. I bet he don't even know how to change a carburetor."  Nate A___ was pretty astute, in his way.

I'm smart. I think most people I know think I'm really smart. A few people think I'm "too smart for my own good," and most certainly think I'm a smart aleck. The people going the right way down the one way streets I've gone down the wrong way probably don't have a very multidimensional view of my intelligence. I'm not in a position to comment on any of this, but I'd like to offer an object lesson on how whatever agreed-upon intelligence I may have recently failed me. The failure is part of a cautionary tale.

I'd like to talk about WebMD and other "search-by-symptom" websites, and I'd like to begin by deploying a timeline.

1996: What we know as "WebMD" deploys as Healthscape. 
1997-Present:  People the world over, on the order of 86.4 million visitors per quarter, search the website for their symptoms, make slapdash diagnoses, become convinced they have terrible terminal illnesses, and freak out. 

The above dynamic has passed from "emerging" to "standard practice." The News warns you against this paranoia. My doctor friends tell me it's beyond common--we live in a world where every generation is Internet-savvy now, and the default move in any situation, from installing a garbage disposal to diagnosing that pain in your abdomen, is to consult the WWW.

But, see, I already know this. I should have been immune. Instead, I played directly into the hands of fear and quick-draw diagnosis, because the vortex of WebMD paranoia is so great that it can pull in even one of my titanic intelligence.

Long and harrowing saga short, I thought I had a life-ruining, ultra-debilitating condition. I can bail out Past Me a bit and say that 100% of the symptoms matched, that the people on the forums (oh, the forums) corroborated my diagnosis. But ultimately, I was wrong. The wrongness in this case was important, because the thing I thought I had (that I didn't have) was indeed so terrible that it made me anxious beyond description, and my life became a waking nightmare. When it comes to health and well-being, avoiding "waking nightmares" is a priority.

The problem with WebMD (and other sites like it) is twofold, as I see it:

First, the symptoms you're looking up are often false positives for other, worse maladies. Without a (brief, expensive, impersonal) visit to a doctor, you can't be sure that the tingling means anything at all. At the same time, relying on websites for diagnosis means you could be missing serious conditions which are asymptomatic.

Second, WebMD mainly subsists on advertising dollars, like most of the Internet. Who primarily advertises on WebMD? Pharmaceutical companies, of course. So there are ads on all sides, trawling for someone with "shortness of breath," "unexplained fatigue," and "frequent heartburn." Since the people visiting these sites are already looking for something to explain and/or fix their symptoms, these ads can be especially inviting. Not only that, but the ads often contain such ambiguous and common symptoms that most people could make a case for having them.

I already knew all this, but I was sucked into the vortex anyway. I found people describing symptoms similar to mine, and the fear took over. As soon as I talked to a real health professional, they made a different diagnosis, and my anxiety creeped back into the orange zone, where it usually resides.

This isn't very novel advice, but it's sound: if you have a physical problem, consult a doctor. The more Internet-literate you are, the worse the chance you'll descend through a portal of misinformation.

You don't have to take it from me.  Here's an article on "cyberchondria" published on...WebMD. 

Or, if you're avoiding that website altogether, here's a New York Times article on the phenomenon, instead.