I may not be a cyberchondriac, but I do believe in the power of Dr. Google.
And for that Symcat, a New York Web and mobile health company that made the above infographic, believes that I and other search-addicted Internet denizens am being utterly foolish.
So what does a cyberchondriac suffer from? Wikipedia defines cyberchondria as the “unfounded escalation of concerns about common symptomology based on review of search results and literature online.”
In other words, the feeling that you must be getting a heart attack because that is the search result you got when you Googled some symptoms you are experiencing.
However, “Dr. Google is not a good doctor,” said Craig Monsen, founder of Symcat, to an audience gathered in the nation’s capital for the third annual Datapalooza organized by the federal government on the power of #healthdata.
Here is the rest of the infographic from Symcat, where it urges users to try Symcat’s disease calculator, which ranks the most likely condition that a user is experiencing based on symptoms entered.
By Arundhati Parmar
Arundhati Parmar is the Medical Devices Reporter at MedCity News. She has covered medical technology since 2008 and specialized in business journalism since 2001. Parmar has three degrees from three continents - a Bachelor of Arts in English from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India; a Masters in English Literature from the University of Sydney, Australia and a Masters in Journalism from Northwestern University in Chicago. She has sworn never to enter a classroom again.More posts by Author
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