Started with what I thought was just a regular headache during a client call last Tuesday. Nothing dramatic, you know? Just this dull ache behind my left eye that wouldn’t quit. Normally I’d pop an Advil and get back to reconciling accounts, but we’re still dealing with all this pandemic stuff and every little symptom makes you wonder if this is it.
So naturally, I did what any rational 58-year-old would do. I googled it.
Three hours later I’m sitting at my kitchen table with seventeen browser tabs open, completely convinced I’ve got a brain tumor. Not just any brain tumor either – according to my extensive research, I was dealing with something called an oligodendroglioma in my frontal lobe. Had to write that down because I couldn’t pronounce it, let alone spell it.
This isn’t my first rodeo with what Linda calls my “internet medical degree.” I’ve diagnosed myself with everything from deep vein thrombosis because my calf cramped up during a long meeting, to a heart attack because I felt a weird twinge in my chest after climbing two flights of stairs to the office printer. That was a fun afternoon explaining to my supervisor why I was clutching my chest and asking if anyone knew CPR.
The eye floater incident was particularly embarrassing. Spent an entire weekend convinced I was going blind because I kept seeing these little squiggly things. Turns out that’s just something that happens when you get older, but WebMD had me planning my life as a blind person. Started researching braille keyboards and everything.
Then there was the tapeworm situation. Don’t ask. Let’s just say I ate a particularly large burrito from that place on Michigan Avenue and felt bloated for two days. Somehow convinced myself I had intestinal parasites. Linda found me at 2 AM reading about deworming treatments for humans. She wasn’t amused.
Here’s the thing though – I actually worked on some of this stuff back when I was doing IT consulting before I got back into accounting full time. Helped design search systems that were supposed to give people “relevant” health information. We optimized everything for engagement, click-through rates, user retention. Never once did we stop to think that in medical terms, “relevant” usually means “worst case scenario that’ll keep you reading until 3 AM.”
My doctor, Dr. Patterson – been seeing him for fifteen years – he’s got a term for people like me. Called me a “zebra” during my last checkup. Apparently that’s what they call patients who always assume they’ve got some rare disease instead of the obvious explanation. “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras,” he said while checking my blood pressure. Easy for him to say.
Back in his day, if you had a headache you either took aspirin or called your doctor if it got really bad. You couldn’t spend four hours reading about rare neurological conditions on your phone while sitting in your pajamas. Sometimes I think we were better off when medical information wasn’t available 24/7.
But here I am anyway, diving deep into medical journals I have no business reading, bookmarking articles about symptoms I probably don’t have, creating elaborate theories about what’s wrong with me. Last year I had this persistent hiccup situation – lasted maybe six hours – and by the end of it I’d convinced myself I had a diaphragm tumor. Actually made a spreadsheet about it. Still have it in my Google Drive somewhere, like a monument to my own ridiculousness.
Linda caught me at midnight practicing how I was going to break the news to the kids about my “terminal diagnosis.” The hiccups stopped the next morning. Haven’t lived that one down yet.
I’m apparently not alone in this madness. Read somewhere that about 40% of Americans regularly google their symptoms, and it usually makes their anxiety worse, not better. They even have a name for it now – cyberchondria. Great, another thing I can add to my list of modern ailments.
Dr. Patterson says he has to build in extra time for what he calls “Google appointments” now. Patients come in with printouts from medical websites, convinced they’ve got diseases they can’t even pronounce. “If WebMD was accurate, we wouldn’t need medical school,” he told me. “Half my job these days is talking people down from whatever Dr. Google told them they have.”
And I get why this happens. The way these sites are designed, they’re built to keep you clicking. “Symptoms of brain tumor” gets way more traffic than “Why most headaches are harmless.” It’s basic marketing – fear sells better than reassurance. The algorithms know this. They feed you the scary stuff because that’s what keeps you engaged.
When I was doing that IT work, I saw the analytics. Users spent way more time on pages about serious conditions than they did on articles about common, harmless symptoms. So guess what content gets prioritized? The stuff that makes you think you’re dying. It’s a business model based on anxiety.
The worst episode was about two years ago when I found what felt like a swollen lymph node under my jaw. Spent maybe thirty minutes convinced I had lymphoma before I even touched a computer. But once I started researching… man, that was a dark week.
Found online support groups for lymphoma patients. Started organizing our financial documents because I figured we’d need them for the medical bills. Made a list of cancer treatment centers. Called Dr. Patterson’s office demanding an emergency appointment. Poor receptionist probably thought I was having a breakdown.
Got in to see his nurse practitioner the next day. She felt around my neck for maybe ten seconds. “Did you have a sore throat recently?” she asked. Well, yeah, actually I did about a week before. “It’s just a reactive lymph node. Perfectly normal. I’m guessing you’ve been googling lymphoma symptoms?”
The look she gave me… I felt like I was back in school getting scolded for not doing my homework. But she was right. I’d spent three days convinced I was dying when all I had was a normal immune response to a minor throat infection.
That’s when I realized I needed some kind of system to deal with this. Because knowing I have health anxiety doesn’t actually stop the health anxiety. It just makes me feel stupid about having it.
Tried using website blockers on medical sites. Figured out how to disable them within a couple hours. Made a deal with Linda that I’d wait 24 hours before googling any symptoms. Broke that rule more times than I can count. Even tried calling Dr. Patterson’s office instead of googling, but that doesn’t work so well at 3 AM when you’re convinced that weird pain in your side is definitely appendicitis.
What’s actually helped is keeping a health anxiety journal. Sounds ridiculous, I know, but hear me out. Before I google anything, I write down what I’m worried about, how anxious I feel on a scale of 1 to 10, and what I think is wrong with me. Then after I do my research and inevitably convince myself I’m dying, I write down how I feel then.
Then – and this is the important part – I go back and write down what actually happened. Turns out my track record for predicting my own medical emergencies is pretty terrible. Haven’t been right once in three years of doing this. It’s like having a personal database of all the times I was completely wrong about my health.
Talked to a psychologist about this – Dr. Richards, Linda found her – and she said something that made sense. “The problem isn’t looking up health information online. The problem is that you’re looking for certainty about something that’s inherently uncertain, and the internet can’t give you that.”
She’s right. Most of my worst google spirals happen when I have vague symptoms I can’t explain. That mysterious headache gets way more research time than an obvious cold. Unexplained fatigue sends me down rabbit holes that a clearly sprained ankle never would. What I’m really looking for isn’t information – it’s reassurance that everything’s going to be okay.
And that’s the one thing WebMD can’t give you.
These days I try to stick to more reputable sites – Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, places like that. Still avoid WebMD because it’s like a gateway drug to medical anxiety. Set a five-minute time limit on symptom searches. Sometimes I even make it.
I’ve also started asking myself what I actually hope to learn before I start searching. If the answer is “I want to make sure this isn’t cancer,” then I know I’m not really looking for information. I’m looking for someone to tell me I’m going to be fine, and google can’t do that.
The internet has made medical information incredibly accessible, which is mostly good. But it’s also made medical anxiety incredibly accessible too. Now anyone can spend their Tuesday night reading about rare diseases and convincing themselves they have symptoms they didn’t even notice an hour ago.
So yeah, if you find yourself at 2 AM reading about brain tumors because you have a headache, you’re not alone. Welcome to modern hypochondria, where everyone’s a medical expert and everything is probably cancer. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to look up whether this weird elbow pain I just noticed could be anything serious. I’m sure it’s nothing, but I should probably check, just to be safe…
Paul’s a Chicago accountant learning to survive in the cloud-software era. He writes candidly (and funnily) about being tech-competent but perpetually one update behind. His motto: technology is great—once someone explains where they’ve hidden the settings.
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