Cyberchondria

Scientific American had an interesting podcast a few days about cyberchondria - stress caused by the use of the Internet to search for information on symptoms that can lead to extreme conclusions. I thought this particular quote was extremely interesting:

Studying the search behavior of about a million users, Microsoft researchers found that a search for chest pain would more likely lead to a link for the worst-case scenario like heart attack, than to the more mundane, "indigestion." Because of the popularity of "heart attack" links, those are typically the ones that come up near the top of search results.

The authors apparently suggested that search engines be improved so that initial health searches are more accurate. That's a fine idea in some ways, but in this case it seems like the current situation might be a bit better than the alternative. If someone goes online searching for chest pain, it seems better to have the more extreme cases pop up (and someone go to the doctor when they might not need to) than have indigestion come up in the results and the person assume all is fine when they are actually having a heart attack. And given how many people aren't especially health literate, it seems unlikely that the real way to solve this problem is through improving the search engines - it seems like patient education is likely more important.