Steel yourself for some alarming news: Cyberchondriacs are on the rise, up from 50 million in 1998 to 175 million today, according to market research firm Harris Interactive. And they're also getting more active: "Fully 32% of all adults who are online say they look for health information 'often,' compared to 22% last year."
Sounds like bad news, doesn't it? But wait—what exactly is a cyberchondriac? According to Harris, they've used the term since 1998 to describe people (are you sitting down?) who look for healthcare information online.
It turns out cyberchondriac is just a malignant-sounding word for what is in fact a benign—if not beneficial—condition.
The debate over what to call patients who look up information about a condition or treatment, a physician's credentials, or even (gasp!) alternative forms of treatment, has been simmering since at least 2007. It was brought to a head, in part, by a Time magazine column by Scott V. Haig, MD, When the patient is a Googler.
In it, he complains about a patient who was rude, demanding, and who researched him and her condition online. (Not to mention that her three-year-old "little monster" stomped fish crackers and Cheerios into his rug.)
After she asked a "barrage of excruciatingly well-informed questions," Haig wrote, he decided to drop her as a patient.
Patient advocates were, not surprisingly, displeased—and not about the fish crackers and Cheerios on the carpet. A post on the New York Times Well blog, A doctor's disdain for medical Googlers, garnered hundreds of emotional responses.
While some said the doctor was merely complaining about demanding patients, others said that by harping on the fact that she'd done research online, he was suggesting that patients who educate themselves online and ask well-informed questions are by their very nature as annoying as a toddler's snack foods ground into a rug.
Meanwhile, a short time after his ruckus-raising Time column, Haig seemed to have learned his lesson—or at least expanded his lexicon. In 2008 he conducted a very civilized roundtable discussion with a group of orthopedic surgeons about how the Internet had changed their practices. The article was titled: How to deal with the digitally empowered patient.
Digitally empowered. Now that has a nice ring to it.
The phrase cyberchondriac came up again in 2008 in the title of a Microsoft study by Ryen White and Eric Horvitz, Cyberchondria: Studies of the Escalation of Medical Concerns in Web Search.
The authors of that study, however, use the term differently than does the Harris study. They grant—and good for them—that online medical information can help laymen better understand health and illness and provide them with feasible explanations for symptoms.
"However," the authors add, "the Web has the potential to increase the anxieties of people who have little or no medical training, especially when Web search is employed as a diagnostic procedure. We use the term cyberchondria to refer to the unfounded escalation of concerns about common symptomatology, based on the review of search results and literature on the Web."
On the other hand, the Harris survey reports how many American adults go online for medical information. Yes, they could be going online to check on symptoms and self-diagnose and yes, they might freak themselves out by doing so.
But they might also be looking for diet and exercise programs to help reduce cholesterol based on a warning from their doctor. Or they might want to make sure they are well-prepared for a visit to the doctor in order to make the most of his or her limited time. According to the Harris poll, 51% of all so-called cyberchondriacs say they have searched for information on the Internet based on discussions with their doctors; 53% discuss the information they found online with their doctors.
In other words, not only is the Internet helping patients better communicate with their doctors, there's no evidence in the Harris poll that the patients in question are suffering from increased anxiety or unfounded escalation of concerns (with or without italics).
Now to be fair, it is unclear whether or not Harris' use of the term is pejorative. Maybe they just think it sounds catchy. And there's no doubt their data is valuable proof that patients have increasingly come to rely on the Internet for medical information since 1998.
But we are not living in 1998. So-called cyberchondriacs are now known by a less negative descriptor: well-informed, engaged, and empowered patients. Here in the year 2010, we call them e-patients.
A note to Harris: Regardless of your intent, it's time to update your terminology.