Is that nagging chest pain caused by gas or is it a heart attack? What is that lump on the arm? When users decide to answer these and other questions about possible diseases by searching for symptoms on the Internet – what is known asauto diagnosis– tend tooverestimating what your symptoms have in common with all kinds of serious illnesses, something that does not happen when they search the Internet for the symptoms of another person, according to a study published in the journalJournal of Consumer Research. “We fear the worst health-wise when it comes to ourselves, but we remain objective and calm when the sick are others, “explains Dengfeng Yan, co-author of the study from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Moreover, faced with the same symptoms,? people overestimate their own chances of contracting rare diseases (and with serious frequencies) compared to other people. “
In the experiments, the researchers provided nearly 250 college students with information about diseases such as the flu, HIV, osteoporosis, and breast cancer. In the case of the flu, they were asked to imagine that they had a series of symptoms (cough, fever, runny nose and headache) and asked if they thought they had the “normal” flu or the more “worrisome” H1N1 swine flu. . They were also asked to diagnose another hypothetical person with those symptoms. According to the researchers, when it came to their own symptoms,people self-diagnosed the H1N1 strain of flu, which is rarer, more oftenthat if they thought the symptoms were from someone else. In other words, their accuracy in correctly measuring the odds of H1N1 infection was reduced if they thought about their own symptoms.
The study authors explain these effects using theconcept of “psychological distance”, which means that when we think of other people we tend to consider broader information and be less subjective than when the problem affects us directly. Hence, Yan insists that, instead of making “amateur” diagnoses, it is convenient to go to the doctor. And, as the new study points out, “the advantage of seeing a real doctor lies not only in that he is an expert, but also in that it is you.”
