The hypo-Googliac

Turns out hypochondriacs aren’t the only people Googling medical symptoms to figure out what might be wrong.

Doctors, as it turns out, Google the tough cases.

A study in the British Medial Journal found six in 10 doctors had used the popular search engine to diagnose baffling cases—and with surprising success.

Doctors typically rely on about 2 million medical facts in their brains, but because technology and medical discovery continue to accelerate, they can’t keep up with the torrent of information about developments, so many of them turn to Google.

I just hope doctors are a little more even-tempered at Googling than I because whenever I look up a symptom, not only do I have it, it’s fatal.

A strange little mark on my toenail? That’s a deadly cardiac infection.

Lump in my throat? Cancerous lymph node.

A muscle twitch in my arm? Early onset Parkinson’s.

And every freckle on my body at some point in time has appeared to me quite plainly to be melanoma, and thus I should get my affairs in order.

I come from a family of notoriously bad, impatient patients. We fuss, we complain, but most of all we worry.

You’d think the Web’s bountiful medical information would soothe people like me. After all, medical sites do a good job wording things carefully and with plenty of disclaimers. They repeatedly warn diagnosing an illness requires a medical professional, and that most of the time symptoms are benign.

Still, I Google on, digging deeper my self-made hole of angst.

I’ve watched online videos of operations I thought I needed. I’ve read arcane online medical documents I could barely understand, yet somehow walked away convinced they were talking about me.

I recently hurt my shoulder, so after some quick Internet legwork I self-diagnosed a torn rotator cuff. It was so easy. My visit to an orthopedic surgeon was a mere formality in my mind. Just tell me when you’re gonna cut me open, Doc.

He took an X-ray, then in about 10 minutes of simple tests, he determined it was unlikely I’d torn anything but the $40 co-pay check from my checkbook. I think he based his diagnosis largely on the fact that when he asked me to push against his hand I nearly knocked him down.

That, or he saw me coming a mile away, and Googled “hypo-Googliac” before I got there.