"Cyberchondria" is disrupting lives

Microsoft publishes report on our obsession with online quacks

26 November 2008 15:21 GMT / By Katie Scott

It's official - an unhealthy number of us spend hours trawling the net to find out what diseases we could have from symptoms only we ourselves have detected.

Yes - it's now official - we're suffering from Cyberchondria.

Microsoft has published a report on this condition, which it apparently researched whilst trying to improve its search engine results for Live Search.

And it seems what we read on the internet can really affect us.

Microsoft studied how people search for medical information based on a 40 million page sample whilst also surveying more than 500 Microsoft employees about their own health-search experiences.

It says: "Our results show that Web search engines have the potential to escalate medical concerns" and Cyberchondria has make us stressed out.

For example, you could look up "headache" and come up with pages on brain tumours, and a search for "chest pain" brings back as many results for heart attack as indigestion.

But the survey also found that more than 75% of those who took part in the survey wouldn't contact their doctor even if their web research said they had something to worry about.

So at least we're just wasting our own time and not the doctors'.

Full tags

Software, Online, Microsoft