“Don’t Google your cancer,” the oncology nurse told me as she drew my blood before my first round of chemotherapy. It was 2006 and I was 17 years old. I was very confused by the emphasis you placed on this advice. Still, I took the printout of the “safe” web addresses she gave me at home and posted it on the kitchen bulletin board, where it remained, ignored, as I slowly progressed through six months of cancer treatment.
I was confused because the opportunities I had to use the Internet to research my recent diagnosis of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a type of blood cancer, were minimal anyway. I didn’t have a smartphone or laptop, and my only Internet access was in common spaces: at school or through my family’s shared computer with its dial-up connection. The idea that I could use these public facilities to explore something as intensely private as my cancer didn’t even register as a possibility for me.
Read more: The unique hell of contracting cancer in youth
Everything changed a year later when I learned that the treatment had not been effective and the cancer had returned. Or it had never disappeared to begin with, it was hard to tell. Standing petrified in my college dorm room, I found the lump on my neck and its malignant properties were quickly confirmed by scans and tests. My doctors told me the chance of this happening was less than 5%. He had had “bad luck.”
Now I was no longer a regularly supervised schoolgirl and I had my own computer. I was free to search for symptoms, side effects, and mortality rates as much as I wanted. The medical professionals were doing the best they could with my case, but of course they couldn’t give me absolute certainty about what was going to happen. Desperately longing for some concrete information about my future, I kept searching and searching until I was literally scared out of my mind. I would have to close the laptop and lie down until the Internet-induced nausea wore off, exhausted by a rigorous schedule of hospital treatments and college classes.
In retrospect, I can now recognize this as an early sign of the hypochondria that would become a feature of my life in my 20s. The popular conception of hypochondria, or health anxiety as it is often called in modern medical lexicon, is that it is rooted in ignorance. Unable to know the full scientific story about this suspected lump or twinge of pain, whether due to lack of access to medical care or fear of what a doctor might say, the anxious brain writes a narrative to explain it, usually one that It involves the worst possible scenario and a terminal illness.
This idea that the ignorance of the hypochondriac is “cured” with knowledge is very old. As I delved deeper into the fascinating but convoluted history of this disease with my own searches, I became concerned about the so-called “glass men” of the middle ages, who experienced something called the glass hoax. Widely documented throughout Europe, these sufferers believed that they were made wholly or partially of glass and not human flesh, and that their obsession with their fragile and brittle nature could come to dominate their entire lives.
The French king Charles VI of the 14th century suffered notably and published Cervantes in 1613 to complete novel about a “glass grad” who experienced this. The treatment was simple: the “glass man” had to be made to understand that, in reality, he was not made of glass. This was usually done by hitting him or squeezing him hard until he recognized that he had not shattered. This test, this additional knowledge of his resilience, would cure him of deception.
But if hypochondria could truly be cured with knowledge, advances in medicine would have made it a thing of the past. Still anxiety disordersincluding health anxiety, is still common in countries with the most advanced health systems. Hypochondria evolves and changes to keep up with scientific knowledge. If before people feared that they were made of glass or that too much black bile would make them melancholy, now they worry about having brain tumors or long COVID-19. At every stage of medical progress, hypochondria is there with us.
Read more: How to Tell If Your Health Problems Are Normal or a Sign of Something Else
In fact, the research sample that the prevalence of health anxiety is increasing among those attending medical clinics, suggesting that greater exposure to medical knowledge is worsening our fears, rather than ridding us of them. This has been partly attributed to the rise of “cyberchondria,” in which health anxiety increases as a result of information found online. First used in the early 2000s, this word describes the pattern of excessive Internet searching I fell into after my cancer was declared cured, when every twinge and snort seemed like a sign that the tumors had returned. .
I rationalized this behavior, as I think many people with preexisting conditions do, as simply being responsible or cautious about my health. Having found a tumor once when my disease was supposed to be cured, I was very vigilant so that it wouldn’t happen again. Googling all my symptoms and falling down an endless rabbit hole of research articles, online forums, and wellness podcasts was simply me being a good patient, I told myself.
It wasn’t excessive because he had a very complicated medical history. The doctors had told me to “be on the lookout” for possible symptoms and that was all he did. It took me a lot of therapy and self-examination to realize that all this additional information wasn’t affecting my medical outcomes in a positive way at all: if anything, it was making me feel worse, not better.
Even with this awareness, it can be difficult to escape the clutches of cyberchondria. Sometimes I feel like the entire Internet is designed to magnify my fears. Typing “does a headache mean…” into Google brings up, among others, the suggestions “miscarriage,” “concussion,” and “brain tumor,” which are significantly more serious problems than the much more common causes and probable “dehydration”, “stressed from work” and “lack of fresh air”.
The “escalation” mechanism that experts have identified as a tool of online political radicalization also operates in this field. Simply typing what seems like a mundane health query into a search engine can be the first step on a journey that leads to misinformation, self-diagnosis, and severe anxiety. Worse still, there are evidence that the so-called “good worriers,” with their health anxiety and cyberchondria, may be up to 70% more likely to develop heart problems. Apparently all this worry can cause the worst to happen.
Knowing what I do now, I have immense respect for the foresight of my oncology nurse in 2006. She said then that Googling my cancer was a bad idea, and she was right, even though the true power of cyberchondria still exists. It had not been untied. for our constantly online existence. The list of approved resources she gave me that day included only my healthcare provider’s website, a patient guide published by a cancer charity, a couple of online medical dictionaries, and some academic publishers. This is what I limit myself to today, although sometimes my fingertips tingle with the desire to search more widely. I could click and click and click until I was sick forever.