What is cyberchondria?

You surfeited yourself on a large meal associated an hour later you're having some weird cramping pains in your chest. You head over to your computer and sort the symptom "chest pain" into your most popular programme. the primary result to crop up is -- heart failure?

Your curiosity escalates into anxiety as you scroll through pages that list heart attack symptoms as the precise ones you're having. over probably, what you're experiencing is not a heart failure at all -- it's the phenomenon of cyberchondria.

The term cyberchondria has inherit use within the internet age, and looking on whom you raise, you may get conflicting data about what characterizes this condition. In 2000, a journalist at the London Sunday Times defined cyberchondria as "the deluded belief you suffer from all the diseases featured on the [I]nternet." In 2001, a BBC article brought up cyberchondria as "[I]nternet print out syndrome." Dr. Brian Fallon of Columbia, a leading research worker on hypochondria, defines cyberchondriacs as "a group of hypochondriacs who have a robust, psychoneurotic compulsive focus to their symptoms." He claims that 90 percent of hypochondriacs who have access to the web become cyberchondriacs [source: abc News].
Research studies have sought-after to redefine the characteristics of cyberchondria, moving far from the hypochondria facet and focusing on the behavior of researching health-related data on-line. per Harris Interactive, a U.S.-based research company that has conducted many studies on cyberchondria, the word hypochondria means "excessive concern about health." By this definition, cyberchondria literally means "online concern about health" and isn't meant to own the derogatory connotation that is tacit with hypochondria.

In the next section, we are going to take a glance at how programme results impact cyberchondria.