News > Using electronic media

This report from Microsoft was reported in a number of different media this week:

The Web has the potential to increase the anxieties of people who have little or no medical training, especially when Web search is employed as a diagnostic procedure. Microsoft use the term cyberchondria to refer to the unfounded escalation of concerns about common symptoms, based on the review of search results and literature on the Web.

Microsoft research performed a large-scale study of how people search for medical information online, supported by a large-scale survey of 515 individuals’ health-related search experiences. They focused on the extent to which common, likely innocuous symptoms can escalate into the review of content on serious, rare conditions that are linked to the common symptoms.

The results show that Web search engines have the potential to escalate medical concerns.- escalation is influenced by the amount and distribution of medical content viewed by users, the presence of escalatory terminology in pages visited, and a user’s predisposition to escalate versus to seek more reasonable explanations for ailments.

They also showed the persistence of post-session anxiety following escalations and the effect that such anxieties can have on interrupting user’s activities across multiple sessions. The authors state that their findings underscore the potential costs and challenges of cyberchondria and suggest opportunities for improving the search and navigation experience for people turning to the Web to interpret common symptoms.

Taken from the Microsoft web site:
http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?type=Technical%20Report&id=1595&0sr=a

See also:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7758183.stm