The other side of the story that should have been reported: How many patients are blown off by their doctors only to find on the Internet that what they are suffering is valid? This is definitely true in the case of people suffering withdrawal symptoms from antidepressants that are falsely blown off as a return of the illness and thus people are put back on meds that have dangerous side effects.

I suggest the reporter visit the Paxil Progress Boards, which is run by an RN, and provided me a tapering schedule that enabled me to have a decent quality of life. If I had listened to my doctor, it would have been way too fast and there is no doubt in my mind that I would have been back on meds that have caused me horrific side effects.

Anyway, it is reports like these that the doctors use to invalidate our suffering saying that you can’t believe everything you read on the Internet.

AA

1. Patients researching their own conditions is fine, and should be encouraged. What I think should be discouraged is patients making their own diagnoses.

2. Google/Microsoft do not have the responsibility here, it is the lay media who try to interpret complex medical conditions and isolated trial findings without adequate knowledge or context are the real people to blame.

Kevin, in the above you quote “self-diagnosis by search engine frequently leads Web searchers to conclude the worst about what ails them.” This comes from the article you linked which is about the study (PDF file). HOwever, the author of that article took “poetic license” with what he was reading. Only in one spot does the PDF talk about the aforementioned, and it is quoting a 1983 study. In the study, though, these same folks admit only 1-5% of the population has hyperchondria and goes on to say, “The Web is fertile ground for those with hypochondria to conduct detailed investigations into their perceived conditions.”

In the study, they use the words “potential for” rather than saying it is a definite problem. And they say, “We found that escalation is potentially related to the amount and distribution of medical content viewed by users, the presence of escalatory terminology in pages visited, and a user’s predisposition to escalate or seek more reasonable explanations for ailments”. Again, remember they were talking about 1-5% of the population.

I find the article you linked misrepresents the study, and thus what you say above misrepresents it, too. It is more about methodology and less about self-diagnosis.

Respectfully…

After sorting through the whole thing, and re-reading several parts of it to make sure I understood what they had done, I found one sentence that really said something worthwhile:

“Search engine architects have a responsibility to ensure that searchers do not experience unnecessary concern generated by the ranking algorithms their engines use.”

I’d like to hear a response from Google on this.