Cyberchondria: what it is and how it is related to looking for symptoms on the Internet

In the digital age, we are used to carrying out all kinds of searches on the Internet to answer questions of a very diverse nature.

But when these doubts have to do with health issues, we are assuming a series of risks that can sometimes be very delicate. We are going to explore this problem through this article, reviewing the concept of cyberchondria and its implications.

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What is cyberchondria?

Cyberchondria, sometimes also known as compondria, is a phenomenon in which some people, After conducting an internet search regarding some physical symptoms that they suffer (or believe they suffer), they conclude that they are suffering from a certain disease, usually of a serious nature.

Most of the time, the symptoms they would be referring to would be very general and even diffuse, so they could fit into all kinds of clinical pictures, from the most common and mild to others that are statistically improbable, but which are the ones that capture the attention of the subject.

Thus, apparently the cyberchondria would seem to fit the pattern of hypochondria. Other authors, in addition, also point to an excess of neuroticism in people who fall into this type of behavior. In any case, the word hypochondria itself is part of the term cyberchondria, together with the root cyber, which refers to computer networks.

Its etymology, therefore, leaves no room for doubt, since we would be dealing with the case of hypochondriac subjects, who will enhance their fears of suffering various diseases through searches in Google and other similar platforms, in such a way that they would self-validate the symptoms that they would be perceiving, to assume a certain diagnosis, normally with a terrible forecast.

In other words, a person who falls into cyberchondria will use Internet search engines to find information about some symptom that he feels, however slight it may be. After this action, you will be able to access pages that describe different clinical pictures, of varying severity. Generally, he will tend to ignore the mild ones and, on the contrary, he will be convinced that his symptom is an indicator of a serious illness.

The word cyberchondria arose from an article in the UK newspaper The Independent in 2001. Shortly after, the BBC chain itself took over and used the same terminology. The description they made in The Independent when using that neologism was that of a use exaggerated search results on health-related websites resulting in increased anxiety.

Research on this psychological alteration

cyberchondria is a relatively recent phenomenon, as is the widespread use of the Internet by the population. This hyperconnection that we have today has brought us many advantages, but it has also given rise to other situations that are negative, such as giving a person with a tendency to hypochondria the opportunity to seek information impulsively to strengthen their fears.

In order to better understand this behavior, some studies have been carried out. One of them was not carried out by psychologists, but by Microsoft technicians, in 2008. These authors are Eric Horvitz and Ryen White. They decided to investigate cyberchondria, which they defined as increased worry due to a general symptom, as a result of research on search engines and websites.

What White and Horvitz did was analyze the searches carried out in this sense, to verify the results that were usually found. The findings they found were disturbing. And it is that, in the face of searches for symptoms as common and common as a headache, something that can happen to anyone, for a myriad of reasons, the most common results concerned rare diseases and extreme and improbable possibilities, such as a tumor cerebral.

They also observed that the process carried out by people with cyberchondria, was a cascading search, that is, constantly. But also, it was not limited to that one session, but could extend over time for several days, even repeating itself for months, in the most extreme cases.

Let's imagine, for a moment, the anxiety that a person can be subjected to who, in a way constantly entrenches the belief that he has a serious ailment by searching and searching on websites. It's a spiral that a hypochondriac may have trouble getting out of.

The authors of this study found that These types of searches can be carried out impulsively, even making the person stop halfway through the tasks they were doing. They designed a survey with which they obtained information from five hundred participants who had engaged in behaviors compatible with cyberchondria.

Most of these people reported anxiety symptoms as a result of the results found in their searches on websites physicians, and further expressed the belief that the diseases encountered were a likely option for their symptoms. White and Horvitz realized that these people tended to fall prey to a series of cognitive biases.

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Cognitive biases of cyberchondria

Next we will review the three main biases that the researchers of the previous study found in relation to cyberchondria.

1. Availability bias

In the first place, the people who participated in the survey showed that they had fallen into what is known as the availability bias. This is a classic heuristic that basically consists of taking the particular case before us as the general rule applicable always..

In this sense, the subjects who searched for the symptoms and found diseases in the first results rare and serious, they tended to think that this was, without a doubt, the most probable picture given the symptoms that they presented. We previously saw the example of the headache and the tumor. This could be a paradigmatic case to visualize the availability bias.

A person searches the Internet for what may be happening to him, since he has had a headache for some time. Suddenly, among the first results, a website dedicated to medicine appears that talks about brain tumors and how one of the symptoms is a headache.

The person, through the cyberchondria, establishes the immediate relationship and believes that what he has is a tumor, when it is evident that there are many more probable causes and that they are not serious.

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2. base rate fallacy

The second bias that can interfere with the reasoning of these people is the fallacy of the base rate. In line with the previous case, subjects can attend to the particular case, such as the tumor, and ignore data that affects all the possibilities, as is the prevalence of this type of disease.

In this example, the person would notice that terrible diagnosis, but would not notice that the probability that he himself would fit that profile is very low, while other pictures, such as simply fatigue, stress, or other possibilities, would be highly probable and would have a radically different prognosis. different.

3. Confirmation bias

Finally, to complete the cyberchondria effect, Horvitz and White found that users often incurred the error caused by the confirmation bias, which paradoxically is logical, when dealing with people hypochondriacs.

The operation of this bias is as follows. The person has a basic preconceived idea, which in this case would be that they have a serious illness. He would then carry out the corresponding behavior to obtain information about the symptoms you have i.e. would you use Google or other search engines to find websites specialized. When finding pages that describe pathologies with very negative prognoses, the person would be convinced that this is the picture that fits their situation.

That is, the confirmation bias that acts to generate cyberchondria causes these individuals to collect information that validates what they already thought beforehand. For this reason, even if they find other information along the way that may be compatible with their symptoms but do not fit with that initial thought, they will most likely discard them and continue the search.

summarizing

The sum of these three heuristics is what enhances the effects of cyberchondria and causes the person to experience that anxiety., being fully convinced that her mild symptom is an unequivocal sign that she has a very serious illness.

This is an issue that worries professionals, because in addition to the suffering experienced by these individuals tend to request medical appointments for specialties that they do not really need, contributing to saturating the system.

Bibliographic references:

• Norr, A.M., Albanese, B.J., Oglesby, M.E., Allan, N.P., Schmidt, N.B. (2015). Anxiety sensitivity and intolerance of uncertainty as potential risk factors for cyberchondria. Journal of Affective Disorders. Elsevier.
• Starcevic, V., Berle, D. (2013). Cyberchondria: towards a better understanding of excessive health-related Internet use. Expert Review of Neurotherapeutics. Taylor &Francis.
• Vismara, M., Caricasole, V., Starcevic, V., Cinosi, E., Dell'Osso, B., Martinotti, G., Fineberg, N.A. (2020). Is cyberchondria a new transdiagnostic digital compulsive syndrome? A systematic review of the evidence. Comprehensive Psychiatry. Elsevier.
• White, R.W., Horvitz, E (2009). Cyberchondria: studies of the escalation of medical concerns in web search. ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS).