Cyberchondria: What It Is And How It Is Related To Searching For Symptoms On The Internet
In the digital age, we are used to carrying out all types of searches on the Internet to resolve doubts of a very diverse nature.
But when these doubts have to do with health issues, we are assuming a series of risks that can sometimes be very delicate. We are going to explore this problem through this article, reviewing the concept of cyberchondria and its implications.
Cyberchondria, sometimes also known as compounding, is a phenomenon whereby some people, After doing an internet search related to some physical symptoms they suffer (or believe they suffer), they come to the conclusion that they are suffering from a certain illness. usually of a serious nature.
Most of the time, the symptoms they would be referring to would be very general and even diffuse, so they could fit into all types of clinical conditions, from the most common and mild ones to others that are really unlikely statistically speaking, but which are the that capture the subject’s attention.
Therefore, cyberchondria apparently would seem to fit within the pattern of hypochondria. Other authors also point to an excess of neuroticism in people who fall into this type of behavior. In any case, the word hypochondria itself is part of the term cyberchondria, linked to the root cyber, which refers to computer networks.
Its etymology, therefore, leaves no room for doubt, since we would be dealing with the case of hypochondriac subjects, who will enhance their fears of suffering from various diseases through searches on Google and other similar platforms, so that they would self-validate the symptoms they experience. they would be perceiving, to assume a certain diagnosis, normally with a terrible prognosis.
In other words, A person who falls into cyberchondria will use Internet search engines to find information about any symptom they feel, no matter how mild it may be. After this action, you will be able to access pages that describe different clinical conditions, of varying severity. Generally, you will tend to ignore the mild ones and, on the contrary, you will convince yourself that your symptom is an indicator of a serious illness.
The word cyberchondria arose from an article in the United Kingdom newspaper The Independent in 2001. Shortly after, the BBC itself took over and used that same terminology. The description they made in The Independent when using that neologism was that of an exaggerated use of searches on health-related websites that resulted in increased anxiety.
Research on this psychological alteration
cyberchondria It is a relatively recent phenomenon, as is the widespread use of the Internet by the population. This hyperconnection that we have today has brought us many advantages, but it has also given rise to other situations that have a negative nature, such as giving a person with a tendency to hypochondria the opportunity to impulsively seek information to strengthen your fears.
In order to better understand this behavior, some studies have been carried out. One of them was not carried out by psychologists, but by Microsoft technicians, in 2008. These authors are Eric Horvitz and Ryen White. They decided to investigate cyberchondria, which they defined as increased worry due to a general symptom, due to research on search engines and websites.
What White and Horvitz did was analyze the searches carried out in this sense, to verify the results that were usually found. The findings they found were disturbing. And, when searching for symptoms as common and common as a headache, something that can happen to anyone, for an infinite number of reasons, the most common results referred to rare diseases and extreme and improbable possibilities, like a brain tumor.
They also observed that The process carried out by people with cyberchondria was a search in the form of a cascade, that is, in a constant manner. But in addition, it was not limited to that single session, but could extend over several days, even being repeated for months, in the most extreme cases.
Let’s imagine, for a moment, the anxiety to which a person can be subjected who constantly reinforces the belief that he or she has a serious illness through searches and more searches on websites. It is a spiral that a hypochondriac person may have trouble getting out of.
The authors of this study found that These types of searches can be carried out impulsively, even causing the person to leave the tasks they were doing halfway through. They designed a survey with which they obtained information from five hundred participants who had engaged in behaviors compatible with cyberchondria.
Most of these people reported symptoms of anxiety as a result of the results found in their searches on medical sites, and also expressed the belief that the diseases found were a likely option for their symptoms. White and Horvitz realized that these people tended to fall into a series of cognitive biases.
Cognitive biases of cyberchondria
Below we will review the three main biases that the researchers from the previous study found in relation to cyberchondria.
1. Availability bias
First, the people who participated in the survey demonstrated that they had fallen into what is known as availability bias. This is a classic heuristic that basically consists of taking the particular case before us as the general rule always applicable.
In that sense, the subjects who searched for symptoms and found rare and serious diseases in the first results tended to think that this was, without a doubt, the most probable condition given the symptoms they presented. We saw previously the example of the headache and the tumor. That could be a paradigmatic case to visualize availability bias.
A person searches the Internet to find out what could be happening to him, since he has had a headache for some time. Suddenly, among the first results, a website dedicated to medicine appears that talks about brain tumors and how one of the symptoms is a headache.
The person, through cyberchondria, establishes the immediate relationship and believes that what he has is a tumor, when it is evident that there are many more probable causes that are not serious at all.
2. Base Rate Fallacy
The second bias that can interfere with these people’s reasoning is the base rate fallacy. In line with the previous case, subjects can attend to the particular case, such as that of the tumor, and ignore data that affects all the possibilities as is the prevalence of that type of disease.
In this example, the person would focus on this terrible diagnosis, but would not notice that the probability of him/herself fitting that profile is very low, while other conditions, such as simply fatigue, stress, or other possibilities, would be highly probable and would have a radically different prognosis.
3. Confirmation bias
Finally, to complete the effect of cyberchondria, Horvitz and White discovered that users tended to make the error caused by confirmation bias, which is paradoxically logical, since they are hypochondriacal people.
The operation of this bias is as follows. The person has a basic preconceived idea, which in this case would be that they suffer from a serious illness. Next, you would perform the corresponding behavior to obtain information about the symptoms you have, that is, you would use Google or other search engines to find specialized websites. When finding pages that describe pathologies with very negative prognoses, the person would be convinced that this is the picture that fits their situation.
That is, the confirmation bias that acts to generate cyberchondria causes these individuals to collect information that validates what they already thought beforehand. Therefore, even if along the way they find other information that may be compatible with their symptoms but does not fit with that initial thought, they will most likely discard it and continue the search.
summarizing
The sum of these three heuristics is what enhances the effects of cyberchondria and makes the person experience that anxiety. being fully convinced that her mild symptom is an unequivocal sign that she suffers from a very serious illness.
This is an issue that worries professionals, because in addition to the suffering that these individuals experience, they tend to request medical appointments for specialties that they do not really need, contributing to saturating the system.
