google for your virtual fever


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It always starts out innocently enough -- for example, with an eye twitch. It's just a little tic, but it keeps coming and going over the course of a few weeks, and so I decide to do a little medical investigation online. I plug "recurrent eye twitch" into my friendly search engine and, after several hours poring over a range of health-related Web sites -- skimming over likely explanations such as fatigue, stress and too much caffeine in favor of dozens of worst-case scenarios, and growing increasingly panicky all the while -- I am utterly convinced that I have multiple sclerosis, at the very least, and quite possibly Lou Gehrig's disease.

But what really ails me? Cyberchondria, loosely defined as the baseless fueling of fears and anxiety about common health symptoms due to Internet research, or, as I like to think of it, Googling oneself into a state of absolute, clinical hysteria over every last pain, itch and strange freckle on your body.

The report showed that about 2 percent of all the Windows Live searches were health-related. Of the 250,000 or so users who engaged in at least one such query during the study, roughly one-third "escalated" their subsequent Web surfing to focus on far more serious -- and much less common -- conditions. In addition, the employee survey showed that this type of escalation interrupted the everyday life of more than half the respondents at least once.

Of course, it's important to acknowledge that there is a lot of high-quality health content on the Internet that has helped a lot of people [...] the problems arise when people turn to a broad Web search to diagnose their ills, says Horvitz, whose professional credentials include an MD degree. "People have come to look at search engines as question-answering systems," he explains. "We now see [the Internet] as a general oracle, in our pockets and desktops, that we can just ask questions to, and people think it's going to answer all questions in a quality manner; therefore, people turn to the system and say, 'Diagnose me; here are the symptoms.' "

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