Many people use Google to research illness symptoms, but here’s why that’s a bad idea
Have you ever googled symptoms you were feeling in an attempt to self-diagnose only to find your slight ear pain wasn’t the result of an infection, but rather some rare consequence of cancer?
Turns out, you’re not the only one who gets bizarre results when using online symptom checkers.
New research shows these services that provide nervous, potentially sick individuals with medical advice and diagnoses are accurate only about a third of the time, according to a study published last week in the Medical Journal of Australia.
Researchers say these services can provide a false sense of security by making someone think the offered advice is correct or that their symptoms aren’t serious.
“We’ve all been guilty of being ‘cyberchondriacs’ and Googling at the first sign of a niggle or headache,” study lead author Michelle Hill said in a news release. “While it may be tempting to use these tools to find out what may be causing your symptoms, most of the time they are unreliable at best and can be dangerous at worst.”
Online symptom checkers ask for information like your age and gender, then require you to type in symptoms; the more information you provide means a higher chance of receiving an accurate diagnosis, according to one such tool on WebMD. Users can provide specific details such as a dull headache as opposed to a pounding one.
The team from Edith Cowan University (ECU) in Joondalup, Australia, analyzed 36 international mobile and web-based symptom checkers between November 2018 and January 2019, the study said.
The services provided correct diagnoses as the first result 36% of the time, while the top three results proved accurate 52% of the time, the release said.
The study also showed that advice regarding emergency and urgent care cases was “appropriate” around 60% of the time, but for non-emergencies, that percentage dropped to between 30% and 40%.
“Generally the triage advice erred on the side of caution, which in some ways is good but can lead to people going to an emergency department when they really don’t need to,” Hill, an ECU master’s student, said in the release.
A lack of government regulation and data transparency might be to blame for the low quality of online symptom checkers, she added.
The researchers noted that health related content is searched on Google about 70,000 times a minute, and in many cases, are done by hypochondriacs.
A hypochondriac— or as Hill puts it, a “cyberchondriac” —is an illness anxiety disorder that involves excessive worrying over the possibility of sickness even when no symptoms are showing, according to Mayo Clinic.
Some signs of “health anxiety” are the lack of assurance after doctor visits or negative test results, constant talking about one’s health and possible illnesses and frequent internet surfing for causes of symptoms, Mayo Clinic said.
Hill says these services shouldn’t replace doctor visits, but they can provide individuals with more information after receiving an official diagnosis.
The United Kingdom’s National Health Service is using online symptom checkers to track “hotspot” coronavirus locations in the nation by monitoring the symptoms people search, Hill said in the release.
This story was originally published May 18, 2020 at 2:10 PM with the headline "Many people use Google to research illness symptoms, but here’s why that’s a bad idea."
