Why searching seems sensible

I don't want to start by telling you the searching is silly. It isn't. People who look up their symptoms are mostly trying to be sensible about their health, and there's a lot to be said for it.

It's immediate. The twitch is happening now, at ten to eleven, and the surgery opens at eight. The phone is eighteen inches away. Anything that offers an answer in ten seconds to a question that's bothering you is going to get used.

It's private. You don't have to say the fear aloud to anybody, or sit in a waiting room, or describe your calf to a receptionist.

It spares other people. Many people who search are trying not to waste a doctor's time. You want to find out for yourself whether the thing is worth an appointment before you take a slot that someone else might need.

It fits an idea of being a responsible patient. We're encouraged to know about our health, to notice changes and to act on them. Looking things up seems to be part of that.

And sometimes it works. The psychiatrists Vladan Starcevic and David Berle, who have written a good deal about this habit, begin by saying that looking for health information online is common and often useful. A study led by Emily Doherty-Torstrick asked 731 people who searched their symptoms how they felt afterwards. Those with low levels of anxiety about illness recalled feeling relief. For them, the search did what it was meant to do. The people with high levels of anxiety about illness recalled feeling worse, during the search and after it. Chapter 5 comes back to them.

So the same act gives different results for different people, and perhaps for the same person on different nights. That's worth keeping in mind through the rest of the book. I'm not arguing that the internet is bad for health or that patients should stay ignorant. My argument is narrower. For some of us, a particular way of searching reliably leaves us frightened. It's done late and alone, it goes past the first answer, and it carries on until something alarming turns up.

I think the search is trying to meet four needs, and this list is mine. You want to know what the thing is. You want to feel calm enough to sleep. You want to work out whether you need to see someone. And you don't want to be a nuisance.

All four are reasonable. The third is the one a search can help with, if you use it a certain way, and chapter 15 builds on that. The first can't be met by reading. The second is met for a few minutes and then undone. The fourth usually comes out backwards, because people who search a lot tend to end up needing more reassurance from others.