Do you suffer from any indisposition? A little sore throat? Why go to the doctor, when the net offers dozens of sites that can, in no time, diagnose your discomfort? Yes but… just like Facebook or Tweeter, self -medication sites – created with the best intentions in the world – can turn into a real addiction, even a source of permanent stress and depression. And this is how your life will be placed forever under the sign of cybercondrie.
An eternal evil
Electronic cousin of hypochondria, cybercondria has the main characteristic: always wanting to know more about the possible causes of a symptom – often banal and explained by examining your day or lifestyle – from its first appearance and imagine that we suffer from the worst disease that this symptom suggests.
But the tragedy of our hypochondriac friend does not stop there. Eager for medical news, she will just have to understand that someone has been diagnosed with illness so that he can immediately feel the symptoms.
And this is where cybercondria is much more serious than its eternal cousin. Because a simple mouse click is enough to get all the details of the most awful and rarest diseases. From there to self -diagnosing or, worse, going to self -medication, there is only one step to take. An act all the more serious since the patient with cybercondrie will always imagine the worst.
A social handicap
Indeed, according to researchers from the Microsoft Research group, coordinated by Eric Horvitz, two percent of internet research concerns health. The group followed the behavior of 515 people and he discovered that the vast majority of people tend to first place their “classification” of research results which concern the most serious disease rather than that which seems more reasonable, and therefore statistically more likely.
But, there is worse … research has shown that the persistence of symptoms of post-research anxiety on the net is very often able to have a negative impact on the work and family life of the people concerned. According to researchers, the net must now evolve in order to provide more precise navigation information and even “adapt” research results so as not to encourage hypochondriac trends.
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