Health-related web queries can send users down a rabbit hole of anxiety and excessive searches. This pattern is prevalent enough to have been given a name: "cyberchondria".  

Thanks to the internet, we can find out everything that's known about any health condition, however fringe, including images, vivid testimonials from sufferers and those warning messages: "Your doctor will ignore you, do your own research!" We can even plug our symptoms into symptom checkers to get a pre-doctor's visit assessment of what we might be dealing with. 

There's undoubtedly a lot of potential in this. We can become increasingly medically literate and make better decisions about healthcare. When doctors don't have satisfactory answers, we have the tools to take matters into our own hands. But there are pitfalls: it's very difficult to draw any conclusions from the swathes of information we find online, there's a lot of misleading content to weed through, and for worriers, the web is a minefield of anxiety triggers. But abstinence is difficult. Because we have access to this information, we feel more responsible for our own health outcomes than ever before. As Tania Lewis writes, health has become an "individual lifestyle issue" (see http://mcs.sagepub.com/content/28/4/521.short). That feeling of responsibility alone can make us anxious. 

In this short podcast episode, Lena and Jacob talk about the phenomenon of cyberchondria and two related studies by researchers at Microsoft who have used their search engine data to analyse what it is about health searches that makes people anxious (see http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/76529/TR-2008-178.pdf) and to test the feasibility of actually using people's health queries to detect conditions (see http://jop.ascopubs.org/content/early/2016/06/02/JOP.2015.010504.full.pdf+html). Eileen and Gina helped produce. 

Thanks for listening!

Lena Walther