Looking up symptoms on the internet could damage your health

While once patients put their utmost trust in their GP, now many arrive for a consultation clutching a diagnosis, freshly printed from the internet, as well as a suggested treatment plan.

After pornography, health is reportedly now the second most searched for topic on the web and, according to latest figures, more than half of us not only go online to find the causes of ailments, but are guilty of believing everything we read.

"I had one patient who was convinced she had to have Prozac," says Dr Paul Cundy, the British Medical Association adviser on internet medicine. "She came to see me and said quite bluntly, 'I've diagnosed myself as being depressed and I need this particular drug'. It was a really difficult case, as she was completely sure in her own mind that she was right.

"Those kind of cases are now a regular occurrence. Just this morning I've dealt with two consultations where patients had found something on the internet and I've had to say, 'No that's rubbish, you can just ignore it'."

The increasing dependence on online medical diagnosis has been identified by experts as cyberchondria and with the internet a breeding ground for bogus sites and unreliable opinion, it can make people feel worse, not better.

"It's human nature to worry but it becomes a condition or disorder if it's a preoccupation, if it starts to take over your life," says psychiatrist and member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, Dr Victoria Lukats. "With health anxiety problems, the more reassurance people seek, the worse it can be. They tend to be only reassured for a few minutes and then they feel worse again. Gradually, it turns into a vicious circle and if you're looking things up on the internet all the time, it actually feeds into that cycle.

"The average person develops a new symptom every six days, so having a niggle is not abnormal, it's the interpretation of those symptoms

that's the difference."

The dangers, says Dr Lukats, are best exemplified by tapping "headache" into Google. While the search will produce some sensible advice, it will also produce links to sites about brain tumours. In reality, only one in 50,000 of us will ever suffer from a brain tumour, but a quick scroll down the internet results would suggest the figure is far higher.

A recent study by Microsoft showed 25 per cent of the documents thrown up by a web search for "headache" pointed to brain tumours as a

possible cause.

"There's no quality control over what's on search engines on the net," says Dr Gordon Brooks, director of the internet site www.patient.co.uk, which was set up by GPs to give the public access to the same high quality information they would get in a doctor's surgery, online. "Getting information may be quick on the internet, but it's not easy to tell whether the information is up to date, reliable and

unbiased.

"As many as eight in 10 of us consult Google for health information, but worryingly the majority don't check the source or the date the information was created, a recent study showed. There is a danger of people putting a symptom in and the results suggesting there's something seriously wrong.

"When we launched our website, we wanted to be honest an

straightforward. If you type in 'headache', it will tell you about the common causes and how to deal with them while alerting you to warning signs of anything more serious. We put the real-life explanations for symptoms at the top of searches, rather than web scaremonger rarities.

"Like everything else, it's about being sensible. No one is saying don't use the internet at all to find out about conditions, but my advice would be to look around, find sites that appear to be up to date, reliable, written by the right people and have the right ethic behind why they're doing it."