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July 27th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda FRIDAY, July 27 (HealthDay News) — Got a weird ache or pain? A rash
that’s hung around too long? With the wealth of information now
available at the click of a mouse, it’s common to search the Web to figure
out what may be wrong with you.
But a new study suggests that when the symptoms are your own,
“self-diagnosis” via the Internet — or anywhere but a doctor’s office —
too often leads to inaccurate, worst-case conclusions.
Research suggests that people tend to overestimate their own risk for
serious ailments, in a way that they wouldn’t do if they were thinking
about someone else’s symptoms.
“This is particularly true when the disease is rare,” said study
co-author Dengfeng Yan, a doctoral student at the Hong Kong University of
Science and Technology. “That is, given the same set of symptoms, people
will overestimate their own likelihood of getting such rare (often
serious) diseases than that of other people.”
The study was published online recently in the Journal of Consumer
Research and will appear in the journal’s February 2013 print
issue.
In a series of six experiments, Yan and co-researcher Jaideep Sengupta
gave nearly 250 college students information about such diseases as flu,
HIV, osteoporosis and breast cancer.
In the experiment on flu, for example, the students were told they were
simply being tested on what they knew about the illness. But the
researchers then told them to imagine that they had a number of
symptoms — cough, fever, runny nose, headache — and then asked whether
they thought they had “regular” flu or the (at the time) rarer and scarier
H1N1 “swine” flu. They were also asked to diagnose a hypothetical
“someone else” with these symptoms.
According to the researchers, when referring to their own symptoms
people were much quicker to diagnose the rarer H1N1 strain of flu compared
to if they thought the symptoms were someone else’s. In other words,
their accuracy in correctly gauging the likelihood of H1N1 infection
dropped if they were thinking about their own symptoms.
Why the difference? “We explain these effects using the concept of
psychological distance,” Yan said. With distancing — in other words,
thinking about someone else rather than yourself — people tend to rely
more on broader information such as statistics (that is, the likelihood
any one person will get disease X) and less on information specific to
the individual, such as the symptoms he or she is having.
“Consumers often fear the worst when it comes to their own health,
while maintaining a calm objectivity with regard to others,” Yan said. If
you’ve got pain in the chest, you think: heart attack. If a friend of a
friend has the same symptoms, you say: probably indigestion.
But this type of thinking can have downsides, the authors write, often
leading “to mistakenly diagnosing oneself as possessing a serious disease,
causing both unnecessary anxiety and wasteful medical expenditure.” They
add that, “mistaken self-diagnoses of this sort are particularly likely
given the ease of information access on the Internet, which frequently
leads consumers to engage in ‘symptom-matching’ exercises.”
The findings ring true with Dr. Peter Galier, an internal medicine
specialist at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center, who reviewed the
findings.
“I think it’s human nature,” he said. People are much more likely to
worry about themselves and family members, he said, than about
strangers.
Getting information via the Web can also make it difficult to decide
what symptoms mean in the absence of a doctor‘s analysis. “When people are
able to access a lot of information that isn’t filtered, and they don’t
have expertise in the field, they don’t know how to prioritize the
information,” Galier explained.
That’s true whether you’re investigating that strange knocking noise in
your car but have no clue about mechanics, he said, or whether you’ve just
spotted a lump in your thigh and have no medical expertise.
For instance, a healthy young man may have just drank a very cold soda
and then has crushing chest pain. If he looks that up online, he is likely
to see that the symptoms may point to a heart attack, Galier said. But
that information doesn’t take vital facts such as the man’s age and
medical history into account, he said. “Chest pain in a 55-year-old guy is
looked at much differently than in a 25-year-old guy,” he said.
Instead of doing amateur diagnosing on their own, Yan said, “We advise
people to see a real doctor.”
And as the new study points out, ”The advantage of seeing a real
doctor isn’t just because he or she is an expert,” he said. “It’s also
that they aren’t you.”
For that reason, they will take into account less “emotional”
information, such as how many people in the population actually get the
condition you worry that you might have.
And what about that worrying time before you can get to your doctor’s
office? “People may simply tell the situation to their colleagues,” Yan
said, since they’re likely to put those symptoms into a less panicked
perspective.
More information
To learn more about how to evaluate health information, head to the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
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