Many people may believe that the internet has made it easier for us to discover what is wrong when we are sick.
But new research suggests that using Google to diagnose illnesses could in fact be a very bad way of getting appropriate medical treatment. Of course, a rigorously trained doctor is likely to give a much more accurate diagnosis than the average web user seeking answers from the internet.
But in addition, scientists have warned that individuals do particularly poorly when asked to work out their own chances of having any particular ailment. This misdiagnosis takes two main forms – self-positivity, where we overestimate the risks of falling prey to an illness, and self-negativity, where the opposite is the case. Two scientists from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology used this sort of finding to develop a more systematic study of how people perceive their chances of illness. The study reminds people that if they try to get medical help from the internet, they are limited by their own biases as well as the haphazard nature of the web.
