Self-Diagnosis & the Internet

Here is one piece of advice:

Never self-diagnose using the Internet.  It will never make you feel better. 

It’s a bold statement, I know. But have you ever searched your symptoms on the Internet? It’s scary.  I once ended up in tears after looking up swollen lymph nodes. I’d like to say that was the last time I’ve used the Internet to self-diagnose, but it’s not.  However, for the purpose of this post, I’m going to use my sister as an example.

This past weekend she was complaining of an intense headache that started Friday night. When I saw her again on Sunday, she said she still had the headache and the medicine she was taking wasn’t really relieving the pain. As we were talking about it, she suddenly got a worried look on her face. She said she had looked up her headache symptoms on the Internet, and it said her headache could mean two things: a migraine or an aneurism. Immediately, my friends and I started talking about why we thought it was just a migraine, and that there wasn’t a lot to worry about.  After all, our mom gets migraines regularly, so they run in the family, right?

I woke up this morning with a lingering thought: “What if it isn’t a migraine?” My sister isn’t one to worry, yet she left my house last night really concerned. Which brings me to another thought: if she hadn’t self-diagnosed on the Internet, would we still be thinking the worst?

There are a lot of websites designed specifically for looking up symptoms, the most renowned being WebMD. This site offers information straight from award-winning medical experts. It’s a one-stop shop for anything you could want to know in the area of health. It’s also where I frequently self-diagnose a minor cold as pneumonia. Despite all of the worrying these sites bring, I continuously go back for one reason:  I’m curious.

-Mary

Do you ever look up your symptoms on the Internet?