“A man who was a hospital” CYBERCHONDRIA: ONLINE HEALTH INFORMATION AND ESCALATION OF HEALTH ANXIETY

Abstract

World Wide Web provides massive amount of health oriented information. The inclination of using internet to get information on health is also all-embracing. Particularly women are found to be the heavy users of online health information (OHI) both for ‘Curative health information’ (CHI) and ‘Preventive health information’ (PHI). This trend is reported to escalate in pandemic like situations due to many factors including increased dependency on online sources. Online health information helps people to have an idea of the health issues and diseases which they probably can be diagnosed with on the basis of their symptoms. Additionally, it can also assist people to have a better understanding of health and illness and provide them with possible explanations for symptoms. Contrariwise, using symptoms as indicators leading to online search can also have undesirable consequences, for example; increase in the anxiety in people. This phenomenon is called cyberchondria, which has recently gained substantial attention from scholars in health communication field. From among the other featured variables in studies on OHI, eHealth literacy is a significant one. There is a huge amount of literature available on established relationship between eHealth literacy and certain aspects of OHI including trust. However, the aspect that how and to what extent factors (eHealth literacy, age and health status of the user) can marginalize the Cyberchondria effects has had little scholarly attention. This study attempts to fill this gap. A survey from 1000 female users of OHI measured eHealth literacy using eHEALS scale and the relationship between the selected variables. Results showed insignificant positive association between ehealth literacy and Cyberchondria (Kendall’s Tau-b= 0.044, p-value=0.294) at 5% level of significance. Negative insignificant association was observed between age of respondents and cyberchondria (Kendall’s Tau-c= -0.057, p-value=0.123). Similarly, the association between health status of respondents and cyberchondria was also found insignificantly negative (Kendall’s Tau-c= -0.065, p-value=0.081). The study showed that eHealth literacy was not found to have association with cyberchondria among users whereas; it established the association of age and health status with cyberchondria. Although the difference was found in direction and signigicance of this relationship. Keywords: Online health information (OHI), eHealth Literacy, Cyberchondria. Online health research (OHR).