The Internet is a great help, but it can lead you astray in self-medication

What do you do when you discover some suspicious sign that may point to an unknown disease? You don't rush to your doctor right away, do you? If only because you can become ridiculous with your nothingness, the doctor will be upset that he has to spend his precious time with you (in the worst case, he will even make a sound of it), and anyway: there is the Internet.

Google is our good friend that knows the answer to everything. Perhaps you have already made the mistake of knowing too much and being very misinformed. This can also be true if we want to identify a disease based on existing symptoms. How simple. Just a few taps and clicks, you don't even need a doctor for the diagnosis.

Then we find the disease whose symptoms we experience ourselves and have already become sick. However, it is not necessarily the disease that we have diagnosed ourselves that is taking over, but the so-called cyberchondria .

Cyberchondria is a complex word, and it was formed from the combination of cyber and hypochondria. It can be guessed that cyber means the use of the Internet, and hypochondria means excessive worry about diseases.

Cyberhondria means to search for information about our health in the online space, but we want to know more and more about it, and we keep reading information on similar topics. In other words, we determine what our illness is and fear it, anxiety arises. This type of self-diagnosis can be encountered by many general practitioners. It is only one thing to determine for ourselves what we are suffering from, but anxiety about the disease also affects health care. Cyberchondria is actually the modern equivalent of hypochondria, in which we use the internet as a tool.

The background of cyberhondria can also be that we want to solve the tension in ourselves by searching. But as we explained above: excessive search and information also causes internal tension. What is certain is that when we notice more and more signs about ourselves and know more and more, it would not only solve the anxiety, but increase it. It is still debatable whether, in the case of cyberchondriacs, hypochondria is present from the beginning or only develops due to the easy and immediate access to information. It is certain that those who find it exciting to analyze medical information themselves will probably turn to the Internet more quickly to get answers to their questions and thus relieve (or even increase) the tension in themselves.

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(Source: marmalade.co.hu | Images: Pixabay)