Google’s plague of fearing the worst about that lump
● When Ashleigh Johnson’s small son developed a fever, she went online to try to work out what was wrong.
The family had been camping in an area where there were ticks, and Johnson had read on a CBS news site that a little girl in the US had died in 2017 from organ failure caused by tick-bite fever.
It turned out that Johnson’s child had a slight case of tonsillitis. He missed just one day of school.
According to Cape Town doctor Saville Furman, who spoke to fellow GPs last week at a University of Cape Town conference, Johnson had fallen prey to “cyberchondria”, a growing phenomenon that is causing havoc for patients and doctors alike.
The condition involves googling symptoms, jumping to conclusions about diagnosis and prognosis, and in some cases even deciding on treatment.
Furman, who has a mug that reads “Don’t confuse your internet search with my medical degree”, said: “The term ‘cyberchondria’ started cropping up in newspapers around 2001, referring to anecdotal reports of patients bringing their doctors printouts from the internet.”
Computer scientists at Microsoft discovered the full extent of it by analysing the internet searches of hundreds of thousands of people.
“About one-third of people searching for medical-related terms tended to ‘escalate’ their search — ratcheting up to more and more dire outcomes,” said Furman.
An initial search for “headache”, for example, might be followed by “headache tumour” then “brain tumour treatment”.
Another study, at St John’s University in New York City, found that more than twothirds of patients who googled their symptoms went to a doctor, but the rest were so anxious about what they had discovered online that they were too scared to hear what a doctor might say.
Of those who were seen by the physician, 71% were told they had worried excessively.
William Bird, the head of Media Monitoring Africa, said the challenge with searching for medical information online “isn’t so much about the internet itself but the search engines and the results that come up first”.
“Unless you know how to search and are very cautious in your approach, you may well find information that isn’t trustworthy but seeks to scare you and sell you products.”
Furman said an example of a reliable site was the one run and developed by the Mayo Clinic in the US, and Bird said “governmentsanctioned sites from countries with wellfunctioning health systems” were also valuable.
Another problem is the spread of simplistic or inaccurate medical and health information on social media. An example of this was fraudulent research carried out by Andrew Wakefield 20 years ago that falsely claimed a link between autism and the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella.
Wakefield had his research published in The Lancet, but the medical journal later retracted the study, and Wakefield was convicted of fraud. But two decades later, with social media at the helm, there are still parents who don’t vaccinate their children because of Wakefield’s research.
On the flipside, said Bird, social media does have benefits. “It can offer huge potential,” he says, “if we direct resources and energy to ensuring we use it to offer good medical advice.”
He says people should rather familiarise themselves with reputable resources.
“An example is MomConnect, where moms get accurate information about their babies through their mobile phones.”
Unfortunately, the limitless nature of the internet and social media means that “people will have to wade through the reams of content from the loopy, mad and dangerous to those trying to sell things”.