To figure out if a headache or a stomach twinge is something insidious, millions of people head to a search engine first.
More than a third of all American adults have gone online to find a diagnosis, according to a 2013 Pew survey, and half of those people wound up discussing what they found with their health care provider.
Looking for a digital diagnosis can either increase or alleviate concerns about a possible illness, according to Microsoft researchers. And there’s even a word that’s cropped up — “cyberchondria” — to describe what happens when searching for medical information starts to become a condition unto itself.
So, what do the data say about our health anxieties — real or imagined?
Here are the top 20 conditions that people in the U.S. searched for on Google in early May, according to the company. Only English search results are included.
Google declined to rank the conditions, so we did it ourselves using Google Trends to compare the average search interest for each condition in that timeframe, indexed to “doctor.”
Diabetes
Depression
Anxiety
Hemorrhoid
Yeast infection
Lupus
Shingles
Psoriasis
Schizophrenia
Lyme disease
HPV
Herpes
Pneumonia
Fibromyalgia
Scabies
Chlamydia
Endometriosis
Strep throat
Diverticulitis
Bronchitis
About the Author Reprints
i was to searched for the most disease topics peoples have been searched about.And about 70% of internet users search online for health information and their most commonly researched conditions,treatment abd procedures
Yes I was,able to use google and knew I had Lyme. Used all the symptoms (past and current). Sadly drs did not view it valid. In so much pain and told to be delusional., somatization and convertion disorder. I tried the hardest and wrote out all the symptoms, questionnable testing and used references but that did not help. So 8 months later I was diagnosed by a lyme literate dr.
I was sure I’d see Schizophrenia twice.