aphar ([personal profile] aphar) wrote2010-05-17 05:23 pm

Google-itis

http://www.southtownstar.com/lifestyles/2273834,051610googleitis.article

More patients every day - at their office, on their lunch breaks, late at night - are searching the Internet to diagnose every oddity and symptom they find.
The increased numbers of patients self-diagnosing online has led to more cases of what Dr. ... calls "Google-itis" - when healthy people excessively type symptoms into the Google search engine.
what this practice does best is increase paranoia. Search engines are better at pointing a patient toward rare diseases, when it's more likely they're suffering from something more commonplace, he said.