Health News Dozen: Top Health-Related Web Searches

The internet provides information at the tap of the fingertips. With a search engine open and one word, anything ever written on the internet about it comes up in the results. And the web has become the go-to reference bible for all things health-related.Want to know how you should be feeling in your fourth month of pregnancy? The internet will give you enough websites, blogs, and medical journals that would take you until your fifth month of pregnancy to read. Just diagnosed with a disease and want to do your own research about how others have dealt with it? Search and you will find. Do you have a strange symptom with your otherwise-basic cold? Is there an odd-looking mole on your left shoulder that keeps getting bigger? The answers are only a computer keyboard away.And everything that is being searched is also being tracked. An online measurement service that analyzes digital data, comScore,Inc., studies such information. This particular study examined various medical conditions that were frequently searched on the internet and provided some interesting results from February of 2008. The far-and-away most searched health condition was pregnancy with 8,841,000 searches in the one-month period. Close behind was cancer with 7,718,000 inquiries. Other terms on the list paled in comparison, as the next most-frequently searched term was flu with 1,824,000 queries.What the comScore analysts noticed was that four of the top twelve terms - pregnancy, herpes, HIV, and HPV - are related to sexual or reproductive health, thus making them more private issues and ones that people would likely be more comfortable exploring on the internet rather than face-to-face with a medical professional. Carolina Petrini, Senior Vice President of comScore, said, “It’s not too surprising that some of the most common health conditions, such as diabetes, depression and flu, have made the list, but it’s interesting that these terms generate fewer searches than significantly less prevalent conditions like cancer and pregnancy. A reason for this many be due to life-changing nature of a cancer diagnosis or a pregnancy. When facing a serious illness like cancer or after becoming pregnant or considering pregnancy, consumers often turn to the internet to search for information and educate themselves in a private setting.”Another notation made by researchers who took part in the comScore study was that a condition’s prevalence is not necessarily linked accordingly to its search frequency. The analysis notes that medical data shows that there are several million more people in the United States with diabetes than cancer, but cancer garnered more than 7.7 million searches, whereas diabetes only received less than 1.8 million inquiries.But what the study did confirm is that the internet is the new encyclopedia, the new house call, the new doctor appointment. While it is not necessarily positive that many people are choosing to study diseases and medical conditions on the internet instead of consulting with a physician, the medical community is hopeful that the information found on the internet is primarily supplemental and simply provides more details to bring to one’s doctor for discussion.