Empowered Patient, a regular feature from CNN Medical News correspondent Elizabeth Cohen, helps put you in the driver’s seat when it comes to health care.

When you’ve got so much information at your fingertips, it’s easy to fall into an online wild goose chase.

First-year medical students are some of the biggest hypochondriacs around. Bombarded with information about every disease under the sun, they start to imagine they have them all. In their minds, every mole is skin cancer. A nosebleed is surely a sign of a tumor. Headache? Must be skyrocketing blood pressure.

“People get terribly anxious,” says Dr. Arthur Barsky, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “One woman who came to see me was convinced she had melanoma. She brought in 20 pages of color photos of various skin lesions, trying to figure out which one looked most like hers.”

And now, because of the Internet, we can all be first-year medical students. We can all develop what’s called “medical student syndrome.” We get basic information, and not necessarily a lot of context, and we’re off and running toward a conclusion that may be completely wrong.

Of course, health information on the Internet can be truly useful. But how do you know when you’re using it constructively, and when you’ve gone off on a medical wild goose chase? “I think it’s fairly easy to cross that line,” says Robin DiMatteo, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside.

So how do you know when you’ve become a “cyberchondriac”?

You may be a cyberchondriac if …

… you feel worse after Web surfing instead of better

“If research on the Internet helps to make you feel empowered, and engaged in a dialogue with your doctor, it’s helpful,” DiMatteo says. “But if it makes your heart rate go up, that’s potentially problematic.”
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Or to put it another way: “If you feel more scared and confused after being on the computer for half an hour, that’s not good,” says Dr. Vicki Rackner, a surgeon and patient advocate.

… your doctor’s reassurances don’t help

“I don’t have a problem with people fishing around on the Internet to see what diseases they might have,” Barsky says. “For most people, a doctor’s reassurances that they’re fine is adequate. I worry about the people for whom that isn’t enough, and whose concerns persist and go right back on the Internet.”

… you move quickly from suspicion to conviction

If you quickly become convinced your shaking hands are Parkinson’s disease, or your sore throat is an immune deficiency, you need to back away, our panel of experts says. Investigate your symptoms if you like, but leave the diagnosing to the doctors.

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