In the pre-Internet days, there wasn’t a wealth of medical information for the man and woman in the street.  Librarians relied on the Merck Manual, a medical dictionary, and maybe a medical text.  Oh, and the PDR.

There were two prominent volumes on medical symptoms – Symptoms and Remedies, which is now affiliated with Johns Hopkins and the AMA’s Guide to Your Family’s Symptoms.  These books creeped me out for two reasons.  If you had symptoms of some physical ailment, you could start out with one and trace it along based on any accompanying symptoms and find out what was wrong with you.  Inevitably, you found that you had stomach cancer or some other horrendous disease.  Secondly, although these books came with plenty of warnings, it caused you to presume that you could diagnose your illness.  As if!

The Internet has compounded this problem geometrically.  There are hundreds of sites that promise medical information.  In a recent study by Microsoft, it was discovered that users of its Live search engine (as well as the company’s own employees) often feared for the worst about whatever was effecting them.  A fairly recent term, “cyberchondria,” was coined for this syndrome.

There is now great interest in developing a medical search engine that would provide more reliable hits.  But, would this really be noticeably more reassuring?  Don’t the best medical web sites (Medline Plus, WebMD, Mayo Clinic) already deliver reliable and thorough information?  Aren’t LIBRARIES still the best places to go for help with these sites, health and medical databases, and (OMG!) books?

Maybe the Web will evolve so that we don’t confuse heart attack chest pain with heart burn chest pain or brain tumor headaches with coffee withdrawal headaches.  However, the next time I get a really bad headache, I’m putting my money on brain tumor.