It’s 9 am and you wake up feeling out of sorts. Your head hurts, you have pains in your stomach. What could be wrong? So you make your way over to your computer and quickly Google your symptoms.. What do you find?.. Lists of diseases and disorders that all share the same symptoms that you have. So now you spend the rest of the day thinking you are chronically ill wilt something and going to die. Okay maybe this is an exaggeration, but to many who self diagnose themselves online, this is some of the anxiety they may feel. I, like many have done this before. Whenever something goes wrong, my computer is the first one to hear about it. The internet and websites such as WebMD have become a form of online community that gives medical advise to millions who do not wish to go to the doctor. There are even such sites for your pet. Many sites are also now creating ways to virtually talk to a doctor so you never have to leave your own home. What are the implications of this? The internet has become a form of psychological retreat. According to Milgram’s six ways that retreat takes place, this meets the third, that we set up structures to replace the personal element of transactions (Schneider, Gruman, & Coutts, 2012). No one wants to bother with going to a doctor and having to answer numerous questions and get poked and prodded, just to be told to take some over the counter medicine. But is self diagnoses the right answer? With unskilled citizens making the decisions about their health based solely upon what they are reading, they may either over diagnose, or under diagnose. Both of these options could be detrimental for someones health, so it may just be better to go to the doctor in the first place. Maybe next time you wake up feeling ill, you will double think about looking up your symptoms and instead go straight to the phone and call your doctor.
Below is a clip from the Ellen show, she does a great way of depicting the comic in the thought of misdiagnosis based upon online medical sites.
Reference
Schneider, F., Gruman, J., & Coutts, L. (2012). Applied social psychology: Understanding and addressing social and practical problems (2nd ed.). Los Angeles: Sage.