This is one of the most recent words spawned by the Internet, and is a form of Internet addiction driven by anxiety. In brief it is the anxiety caused by too much searching for health information, that is often contradictory, and which causes the searcher to believe that they have excessively serious illnesses, or diagnoses that are out of proportion to their symptoms.

I have just put the common symptoms "headache, nausea, dizziness" into Google, and in the first ten responses could find diagnoses ranging from the flu, to stomach ulcers right up to a range of serious neurological disorders, including brain cancer.

Everyone gets hypochondriacal on occasions, and believes that they have illnesses where none exist. Patients who in the past had "hypochondriasis" tended to present to their doctors with the latest medical dictionary or pharmaceutical book. Alternatively, they had heard tales of woe from a friend, a colleague, or the local gossip suggesting that the minor symptom that they had may be a sign of impending doom and a long and prolonged death. . It's quite natural, therefore, that as we all now have access to huge amounts of health information on the Internet, that some people might start imagining that they have dreadful illnesses. This is certainly happening. There is no doubt that some patients are presenting with symptoms of "cyberchondria". I have seen several in my own practice. The most serious case I have seen was a very intelligent university student, who had to be literally withdrawn from the Internet because he was spending up to 18 hours per day searching for "cures" for his fantasy illnesses. Luckily he had understanding parents who did not have a computer at their home and who let him move back with them for several months so that he could be "dried out" in an Internet free environment.

What should you do if you think you, or a loved one, is a cyberchondriac? The first step is to go and talk to your doctor, seek reassurance about your symptoms, make sure that they are properly medically investigated, and use your doctor as a health information analyst, so that you can understand which symptoms are of concern, and which are not. "Treatment" generally consists of providing reassuring and accurate information about an individual's health status, and teaching them how to work together with their doctor to analyze the health information that they found on the Internet more critically and more accurately. Much of the health information on the Internet is of good quality, but there are also large numbers of websites with incorrect, or even bizarre, information that has been placed for commercial, philosophical or political purposes, that can make people very confused, anxious and cyberchondriacal. I have for a number of years handed out information to patients on the best websites to go to for health information, and on how to search easily for high quality accurate health information.

If you are in this situation, then you should certainly consult with your doctor, and over time, learn to use the Internet more effectively to improve your health. It is a wonderful tool for this purpose and is currently used by about 10 million Americans each day who search for health information for themselves or a loved one.