I had a pretty good summer, but one of the low points would have to be getting the plague.
It was just like any other day. I woke up and groggily hobbled into the bathroom to brush my teeth, but looking in the mirror, BAM! My tongue was black.
I rubbed my eyes; was I hallucinating? No. I grabbed my toothbrush and scrubbed away like Dick Van Dyke, Mary Poppins chimney sweep style. Still nothing.
So, in a tizzy, I did what any normal human would do. I googled ‘symptoms of the plague’ on the internet. Sure enough, under symptoms of Septicemic Plague, was blackening tissue. It was official, I was dying.
Except I wasn’t.
It turns out, the plague I thought I had was just a strange reaction I had to Pepto-Bismol. I was incredibly relieved, although my mother was none too pleased with me waking her up in a frenzy asking for a ride to the morgue.
I know, what a shock. The internet had duped me. Of course, this isn’t just me.
Finding symptoms on the internet is incredibly common. In fact, a survey from the Pew Research Internet Project showed 72 percent of people on the internet had used it to search for health-related information in the past year. Within this group, 1 percent had used social media, 13 percent had used WebMD or other medically aligned websites, and 77 percent–the vast majority–started with Google, Yahoo!, Bing or another search engine.
That’s a heck of a lot of people who could be scurrying around thinking they have the plague. I think anyone can see why that’s not ideal.
Sure, there are probably some people who can handle the awesome responsibility of typing in symptoms and looking beyond the first 10 sources that all point to cancer. But I’m way too much of a prophet of doom.
The internet opens up infinite possibilities, but it’s hard to admit that maybe accessing these possibilities doesn’t change much. I want to think that with access to unlimited information, I can be a doctor or a lawyer or an expert at anything, but the truth is, most of the internet can’t help at all.
According to a study published in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, nearly half of the top medical condition search results turned up commercial sites.
Of those sites, some, like eMedicine and WebMD, provided valuable and relatively accurate information. But the rest of the sites promoted their own products as treatment options, without medical evidence to support the claims.
It’s hard enough to find genuine information on the internet, and human error just adds another level.
In 2010, Nottingham University’s department of pediatrics did a study to see how well everyday people functioned as diagnosticians with the internet as substitute for a medical degree.
They found that even though around 78% of information on medical websites (WebMD, Mayoclinic, etc) were correct, 49% of people still could not find the correct diagnosis or solution to their problem.

No matter how much information is out there, I’m still not a medical professional. There’s no way I can sift through copious medical facts, symptoms, and Latin names for a right answer 100% of the time.
But maybe that’s not the reason I can’t seem to find a reasonable diagnosis at all.
Maybe I’m more likely to look at my symptoms and say I have cancer, or Ebola, or a plague because I want to discover something. I want my google search to mean something. But it doesn’t.
Basically, the moral of the story is don’t google your symptoms. The internet is great for a lot of things, but identifying illness in jumpy teens is not one of them. Doctors still have the edge in that market. Don’t start planning your own funeral over an upset stomach.