skippy66
20-06-14, 14:52
Google is a fantastic resource for most people. It’s terrible for people with health anxiety. It’s all too easy to feel a symptom and consult Dr Google on your laptop or phone, only to read that you’ve probably got a terminal illness. A trip to your real doctor confirms that your fears were unfounded and he probably told you to stay off Google in future. In practice, avoiding Dr Google is extremely difficult, but it must be done to break the vicious cycle of health anxiety.
Technology is everywhere these days. You’re never far from a computer. In fact, most of us have a smartphone which we carry everywhere, and which can provide instant internet access on the go. I do wonder how people with health anxiety coped before smartphones and computers. Perhaps they all congregated around the medical section of local libraries? I believe that the situation for health anxiety sufferers has become much worse as a result of this technology, and that to break the vicious cycle of health anxiety you must initially wean yourself off medical websites.
About four or five years ago I was given an iPhone by my wife for Christmas. Although I was delighted at the time, this device probably increased my health anxiety ten-fold. All of a sudden I could Google my symptoms 24/7. On the train, in a restaurant, on holiday, on the loo. Pretty much anywhere. It was so easy, so instant. It became a crutch. Not a very effective crutch as it only worked occasionally and only in the short-term, but a crutch nonetheless. To compound things, my job involved sitting in front of a computer all day unsupervised (I worked for myself). It wasn’t long before I was using it to research my symptoms all day, and my business started to suffer.
Google is by far the world’s best search engine in my opinion. It has a massive market share (over 90%) and people love it’s simplicity and accurate, relevant results for most searches. This is all achieved by their complex algorithms which rank certain websites above others for various keyword searches. Most of the time this works perfectly. Search for ‘cake’ and the top result is a Wikipedia article all about cake, followed by websites about cake recipes and cake shops in your local area.
For health-related searches, Google doesn’t do so well. A search for ‘causes of chest pain’ will show web pages about heart attacks and pleurisy from large health websites such as the NHS, WebMD and Medicinenet. But chest pain has multiple causes, most of them not a serious medical emergency. So why is Google getting this so wrong?
It’s all to do with how Google’s algorithm ranks websites and articles. Google never reveals how it’s algorithm is calculated - if it did, it would leave itself open to website owners trying to ‘game the system’ and make their website number one for a particular search term regardless of relevance. This is not in line with Google’s mission statement of delivering the best user experience possible. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) experts spend their lives trying to work out Google’s constantly changing algorithms, and there is a general consensus about how results are calculated.
It is widely believed that a website’s ranking for a particular search term is mainly down to the importance of that website. According to Google, a website is important if lots of other websites link to it. It is deemed more important still if lots of people talk about it on social media like Facebook or Twitter. This is why large, respected medical sites like the NHS website and WebMD appear at the top of most health-related searches. But the pages within these websites which are ranked highest are the ones which are linked to and shared the most. People are more likely to share or link to a web page about heart attacks than a page about chest muscle strain. It’s more dramatic, more interesting, more shareable. Hence these pages rank higher, and results are skewed in terms of the most common cause for a particular symptom. The scary ones usually get top billing.
There is more - a website doesn’t have to be a medical website to be deemed important for a medical search. Yahoo! Answers is a website where people ask questions and receive answers from members of the public. Most of the ‘answerers’ are not medically trained, so the answers given are not to be trusted. However the site is huge and plenty of people ask variations of the same health-related questions on there, so it ranks highly on Google. An example of one of these questions is: ‘What is causing my chest pain?’ It is not uncommon for several answers to be along the lines of ‘probably a heart attack - go to the ER immediately!’.
You will often find online newspapers on the first page of search results for symptom queries. In the UK, the Daily Mail website features prominently because it’s such an ‘authority’ site and so many people link to it’s stories. The problem is that online newspapers do not run stories about a guy whose chest pain turned out to be an anxiety attack or strained muscles. You’re more likely to read about a guy who had chest pains and then died from a dramatic heart attack the next day. Some would call it scaremongering, but it’s what newspapers have always done - printed the dramatic stories and avoided the boring ones. Unfortunately this is human nature. The terrible news is indeed terrible news for the health anxiety sufferer.
A knowledge of how search engines like Google work is crucial in putting your online symptom research into context. Once you understand how and why medical results are skewed, you will begin to see the bigger picture and expose Dr Google for what he is. However great the temptation is to google your latest symptom, you must resist. If you’re truly concerned then you should book an appointment with your doctor instead. They are medically trained to look at you. Your general appearance and manner is apparently very important to a doctor trying to deduce whether your problem is serious. This is something you simply can’t get from Dr Google.
I managed to stop researching my symptoms online once I had the knowledge of how misleading the results could be. Why scare myself unnecessarily, I asked myself. Any reassurance I had ever received from Google had not lasted long. I knew that in the long run it was making things worse.
If you use the internet regularly, simply not researching symptoms is not the end of the ordeal unfortunately. You can be reading an article about something completely unrelated, only to see an advert at the bottom of the page: ‘4 signs of an impending heart attack’ or similar. Celebrities die, and the news is full of how they died and the final moments before their death in minute detail. You simply can’t avoid all the bad health-related news, but you can take steps to reduce it.
You will know that certain websites like to sensationalise, and dwell on details of awful tragedies. In the immediate term I would recommend blocking these from your internet search results. You can do this by installing Google Chrome as your internet browser, and using their ‘block websites’ tool. Get rid of the ones which post health stories which make you anxious. Once your health anxiety is reduced, I would turn this feature off as you’re at the next stage which is deliberate exposure to scary health stories in order to reduce the fear of them.
‘Re-marketing’ has become another common practice in internet marketing. This works in the following way: you search for something, e.g. stroke symptoms. The website you visit stores what’s called a ‘cookie’ on your computer. Then, when you visit another website, maybe the next day, it may have an ad for ‘stroke management therapy’ or ‘how to spot a stroke’. These are tempting to click on for any health anxiety-sufferer. The website could be completely unrelated to health, but because the original cookie was stored your computer knows what you searched for the previous day and shows an ad related to that original search. It seems like you can’t escape from health-related adverts. The way to eliminate this is to clear and to block cookies on your computer, which can be done in your browser settings. Again, this is a short-term fix to reduce your health anxiety. In the longer term you need to start deliberately exposing yourself to these websites and adverts.
Once I had weaned myself off Google by blocking as much health stuff as possible I began to feel a bit better. I had begun to break the cycle of reassurance-seeking but there was still a long way to go and I was still experiencing what I thought were life-threatening symptoms on a daily basis.
Technology is everywhere these days. You’re never far from a computer. In fact, most of us have a smartphone which we carry everywhere, and which can provide instant internet access on the go. I do wonder how people with health anxiety coped before smartphones and computers. Perhaps they all congregated around the medical section of local libraries? I believe that the situation for health anxiety sufferers has become much worse as a result of this technology, and that to break the vicious cycle of health anxiety you must initially wean yourself off medical websites.
About four or five years ago I was given an iPhone by my wife for Christmas. Although I was delighted at the time, this device probably increased my health anxiety ten-fold. All of a sudden I could Google my symptoms 24/7. On the train, in a restaurant, on holiday, on the loo. Pretty much anywhere. It was so easy, so instant. It became a crutch. Not a very effective crutch as it only worked occasionally and only in the short-term, but a crutch nonetheless. To compound things, my job involved sitting in front of a computer all day unsupervised (I worked for myself). It wasn’t long before I was using it to research my symptoms all day, and my business started to suffer.
Google is by far the world’s best search engine in my opinion. It has a massive market share (over 90%) and people love it’s simplicity and accurate, relevant results for most searches. This is all achieved by their complex algorithms which rank certain websites above others for various keyword searches. Most of the time this works perfectly. Search for ‘cake’ and the top result is a Wikipedia article all about cake, followed by websites about cake recipes and cake shops in your local area.
For health-related searches, Google doesn’t do so well. A search for ‘causes of chest pain’ will show web pages about heart attacks and pleurisy from large health websites such as the NHS, WebMD and Medicinenet. But chest pain has multiple causes, most of them not a serious medical emergency. So why is Google getting this so wrong?
It’s all to do with how Google’s algorithm ranks websites and articles. Google never reveals how it’s algorithm is calculated - if it did, it would leave itself open to website owners trying to ‘game the system’ and make their website number one for a particular search term regardless of relevance. This is not in line with Google’s mission statement of delivering the best user experience possible. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) experts spend their lives trying to work out Google’s constantly changing algorithms, and there is a general consensus about how results are calculated.
It is widely believed that a website’s ranking for a particular search term is mainly down to the importance of that website. According to Google, a website is important if lots of other websites link to it. It is deemed more important still if lots of people talk about it on social media like Facebook or Twitter. This is why large, respected medical sites like the NHS website and WebMD appear at the top of most health-related searches. But the pages within these websites which are ranked highest are the ones which are linked to and shared the most. People are more likely to share or link to a web page about heart attacks than a page about chest muscle strain. It’s more dramatic, more interesting, more shareable. Hence these pages rank higher, and results are skewed in terms of the most common cause for a particular symptom. The scary ones usually get top billing.
There is more - a website doesn’t have to be a medical website to be deemed important for a medical search. Yahoo! Answers is a website where people ask questions and receive answers from members of the public. Most of the ‘answerers’ are not medically trained, so the answers given are not to be trusted. However the site is huge and plenty of people ask variations of the same health-related questions on there, so it ranks highly on Google. An example of one of these questions is: ‘What is causing my chest pain?’ It is not uncommon for several answers to be along the lines of ‘probably a heart attack - go to the ER immediately!’.
You will often find online newspapers on the first page of search results for symptom queries. In the UK, the Daily Mail website features prominently because it’s such an ‘authority’ site and so many people link to it’s stories. The problem is that online newspapers do not run stories about a guy whose chest pain turned out to be an anxiety attack or strained muscles. You’re more likely to read about a guy who had chest pains and then died from a dramatic heart attack the next day. Some would call it scaremongering, but it’s what newspapers have always done - printed the dramatic stories and avoided the boring ones. Unfortunately this is human nature. The terrible news is indeed terrible news for the health anxiety sufferer.
A knowledge of how search engines like Google work is crucial in putting your online symptom research into context. Once you understand how and why medical results are skewed, you will begin to see the bigger picture and expose Dr Google for what he is. However great the temptation is to google your latest symptom, you must resist. If you’re truly concerned then you should book an appointment with your doctor instead. They are medically trained to look at you. Your general appearance and manner is apparently very important to a doctor trying to deduce whether your problem is serious. This is something you simply can’t get from Dr Google.
I managed to stop researching my symptoms online once I had the knowledge of how misleading the results could be. Why scare myself unnecessarily, I asked myself. Any reassurance I had ever received from Google had not lasted long. I knew that in the long run it was making things worse.
If you use the internet regularly, simply not researching symptoms is not the end of the ordeal unfortunately. You can be reading an article about something completely unrelated, only to see an advert at the bottom of the page: ‘4 signs of an impending heart attack’ or similar. Celebrities die, and the news is full of how they died and the final moments before their death in minute detail. You simply can’t avoid all the bad health-related news, but you can take steps to reduce it.
You will know that certain websites like to sensationalise, and dwell on details of awful tragedies. In the immediate term I would recommend blocking these from your internet search results. You can do this by installing Google Chrome as your internet browser, and using their ‘block websites’ tool. Get rid of the ones which post health stories which make you anxious. Once your health anxiety is reduced, I would turn this feature off as you’re at the next stage which is deliberate exposure to scary health stories in order to reduce the fear of them.
‘Re-marketing’ has become another common practice in internet marketing. This works in the following way: you search for something, e.g. stroke symptoms. The website you visit stores what’s called a ‘cookie’ on your computer. Then, when you visit another website, maybe the next day, it may have an ad for ‘stroke management therapy’ or ‘how to spot a stroke’. These are tempting to click on for any health anxiety-sufferer. The website could be completely unrelated to health, but because the original cookie was stored your computer knows what you searched for the previous day and shows an ad related to that original search. It seems like you can’t escape from health-related adverts. The way to eliminate this is to clear and to block cookies on your computer, which can be done in your browser settings. Again, this is a short-term fix to reduce your health anxiety. In the longer term you need to start deliberately exposing yourself to these websites and adverts.
Once I had weaned myself off Google by blocking as much health stuff as possible I began to feel a bit better. I had begun to break the cycle of reassurance-seeking but there was still a long way to go and I was still experiencing what I thought were life-threatening symptoms on a daily basis.