Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Googling can mislead people seeking health information - washingtonpost.com

It always starts out innocently enough -- for example, with an eye twitch. It's just a little tic, but it keeps coming and going over the course of a few weeks, and so I decide to do a little medical investigation online.

I plug "recurrent eye twitch" into my friendly search engine and, after several hours poring over a range of health-related Web sites -- skimming over likely explanations such as fatigue, stress and too much caffeine in favor of dozens of worst-case scenarios, and growing increasingly panicky all the while -- I am utterly convinced that I have multiple sclerosis, at the very least, and quite possibly Lou Gehrig's disease...