I know I’m sick – very sick, with a very serious illness.

Yesterday, I felt a bit tired, today my neck hurts – and when I looked up the symptoms on the web I found that my condition was very similar to that which people experience when they have some very serious diseases. Scary…

The internet age seems to have created a new type of patient. Having learned about some nasty virus, infection or syndrome on the web, some individuals become overly worried that they have developed an illness. People are arriving at doctor’s offices and hospital emergency rooms in record numbers claiming that they have all of the symptoms of a particular disease and demanding tests or even treatment. Some medical professionals have started calling these patients ‘cyberchondriacs’.

Hippocrates, an ancient Greek physician is thought to have come up with a phrase regarding people who had non-specific complaints in the body, above the stomach – hypochondriac - hypo (below) and chondros (cartilage of the breast bone). Doctors today view people as hypochondriac if they have an excessive amount of anxiety regarding their health, or are constantly developing fears of new symptoms.

Strictly speaking, the word symptom refers to the report a patient is making of what they feel in their body. Doctors, of course, take symptoms into account, however, they are also looking for signs – which are defined as being something occurring to a patient which can be observed by someone else other than the sufferer.

Many websites are currently providing information to non-medical-professionals. At the least worrying end of the scale, some of these sites list symptoms of illnesses, possible methods of testing and clinical diagnosis – while other bolder sites claim to be able to diagnose symptoms online.

What problems are potentially being created by cyberchondriacs?