Cyberchondriacs

I have a friend who starts feeling the symptoms of any disease she reads about in the newspaper. Thank goodness she hasn’t found WebMd yet:

First-year medical students are some of the biggest hypochondriacs around. Bombarded with information about every disease under the sun, they start to imagine they have them all. In their minds, every mole is skin cancer. A nosebleed is surely a sign of a tumor. Headache? Must be skyrocketing blood pressure.

“People get terribly anxious,” says Dr. Arthur Barsky, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “One woman who came to see me was convinced she had melanoma. She brought in 20 pages of color photos of various skin lesions, trying to figure out which one looked most like hers.”

And now, because of the Internet, we can all be first-year medical students. We can all develop what’s called “medical student syndrome.” We get basic information, and not necessarily a lot of context, and we’re off and running toward a conclusion that may be completely wrong.

I’ve never been inclined to hypochondria; I’m more like the comedian who said, “If I knew I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.” But I swear TV commercials are determined to turn me into one. Watch for any two-hour period of time, and you’ll see half a dozen maladies you never heard of that they now have a drug to fix.