The Spreading of Cyberchondria

With the rise of the popularity of the internet, the rise of cyberchondria will exist “U.S numbers of cyberchondriacs has risen from 54 million to about 110 million in the (…) past five years.” (Greenspan, 2002). Since people are accustomed to searching everything up online. People have become obsessed with the internet and obsessed of having everything at their fingertips, so their health is no exception.Furthermore, people have become lazy and don’t want to leave the comfort of their home. So what they do is search up their symptoms online and become comfortable with the results they get because they trust the information they have found.

            The common websites that cyberchondriacs use are mostly medical journals, commercial health pages and academic or research institutions websites. However, most of these websites often post most extreme information. For example, according to Horvitz and White’s research from the article “cyberchondria: The perils of internet self-diagnosis” brain tumours are often the first thing people see when they search up migraines on the internet. This is quite alarming because something common like a headache can be interoperated as cancer due to people being unwilling to go to the doctors to find out what their symptoms actually mean.

            Eight out of 10 people use the internet to find out information on their disease; furthermore, out of those eight people, 75% of them don’t check the source of the information that they are looking at. That means that around 80% of the world's population looks up their symptoms online, this means a huge population of people are relying more  and more on the internet for their diagnosis.

            Also, with the spread of new diseases, people become paranoid if they have it or not. For example, when H1N1 was first brought to life everyone freaked out, they all thought they had it. If people sneezed everyone freaked out because they thought, they had the disease. Furthermore, if people even started to realize they immediately searched the symptoms of the virus and associated it with themselves.  

            Overall the rise in the popularity of the internet is the reason why cyberchondria is so big today. The vast amount of information we have at our fingertips is astonishing and people can get carried away by it so fast.

R. G. (2002). Cyberchondria is Spreading. Retrieved February 20, 2016, from https://www.clickz.com/clickz/news/1693085/cyberchondria-spreading

S. U. (2009). PDF complete. Cyberchondria: The Perils of Internet Self-diagnosis. Retrieved February 18, 2016, from http://129.195.254.33/Global/pdf/Press/independent.pdf