One of the pet hates of GPs is patients who come in and say: "I read that bit called '
Well guys, it's getting worse. Google is creating a nation of Cyberchondriacs as patients Google their symptoms and come up with the most alarming results.
People apparently see the Google results as they would a diagnosis from their GP i.e. as a considered judgment balancing the known symptoms with the multiple possible causes and the patient's medical history.
For some reason, it seems, people always accept the very worst interpretation of what could be wrong with them when they do these Google medical searches, and then make the first available appointment with their GP to pop round and tell him all about it.
Of course there is a strange snobbery about medical problems. People love to trump someone's description of an illness with a description of their own, much more serious condition.
Research done by Microsoft shows that people accept the worst case medical scenario even though lesser, more benign, diagnoses are much more likely to be accurate simply because the worst case scenarios are rarer.
According to Microsoft, two per cent of all Web searches are medical related while, what is more serious from Microsoft's point of view, is that half of the Microsoft employees surveyed admitted to researching their medical problems on-line during work hours. Shock Horror. C'mon, Bill, what are you running? A boot camp?
Be that as it may, Microsoft is working on ways to make their search engines produce less alarming results which encourage searchers to accept that they're not really very ill at all. Or at all.
Even if it makes people feel they're less interesting for being perfectly healthy.
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