Never google your symptoms

It seems like a good idea to google your symptoms because in that case you don’t have to waste your money on the doctor’s fee and medicines for minor reasons. However, googling your symptoms can never give you an accurate result. Either you will overestimate your symptoms and take wrong medication and treatment, or you will underestimate it and let the condition get worse.

Panic time!

Googling symptoms always has the risk of developing health anxiety, a real condition in which people start to worry excessively thinking that they might be sick. Being unduly tensed about having a serious illness can turn you into a hypochondriac. Even if you are not a hypochondriac, searching symptoms and diseases online will make you lose your peace of mind. For example, a symptom checker might tell you that the simple headache of yours is a sign of a brain tumour.

Minor to major issues

Ignorance can be dangerous for your health. Suppose you google about your bad cough and it underestimates your condition by telling you that it’s a minor health issue. You are relieved that it’s not that serious. However, reality can be harsher and you can have tuberculosis or any other disease. This kind of misinformation can make your health condition more vulnerable.

Costs more money

Hypochondriacs and cyberchondriacs face extreme anxiety and mental issues. For those who have minor problems regarding their physical health, it gets worse. They become anxious about their medical condition, and it often leads them to unnecessary trips to a physician’s office, medical tests, treatments and extra medicines to deal with stress, causing them to bear the weight of additional expenses.

Remember to consult a doctor before jumping to a conclusion after googling your symptoms, because doctors spend a lot of years, basically their whole life to learn about symptoms and diseases. If diagnosis and treatment by googling were effective, they would not need to work so hard.