Informative Speech
INTRODUCTION
Picture this you just got finish eating a huge meal and an hour later you're having some weird cramping pains in your chest. You head over to your computer and type the symptom "chest pain" into your preferred search engine. The first result to pop up is heart attack. Your curiosity escalates into anxiety as you scroll through pages that list heart attack symptoms as the exact ones you're having. More than likely, what you're experiencing isn't a heart attack at all but maybe something as simple as heartburn. Something that could have been treated by taking an antacid has resulted in an ER visit that has now cost you thousands of dollars. This is an example of cyberchondria. Cyberchondria refers to people that use the Internet to look up medical information and use the information to diagnosis themselves.
BODY I
Cyberchondria causes a lot of people to self-misdiagnosis themselves. According to MSNBC.com, “Although medical websites such as Web MD and Mayo Clinic provide key insights into identifying and treating various illnesses, experts warn they also make it easy for people to misdiagnosis health problems and can lead to “cyberchondria,” or anxiety borne from online health-related searches”. After reading symptoms online a person may start to think they have those symptoms, creating a delusion in their minds. For example, a person goes to a search engine and type in “fever with cough”…instead of them assuming it’s just a simple cold, they start reading the symptoms of the flu...and thinking to themselves “I did have the shakes and was feeling cold earlier”, forgetting he/she had the air conditioning turned downed when getting out of the shower or “saying I have been feeling fatigue for the past couple of weeks”, when the real cause of their fatigue has been from doing the extreme intense workout Insanity for the past couple of weeks. With all these worries and concerns leads a person to assume the worse. According to American Medical News,
Picture this you just got finish eating a huge meal and an hour later you're having some weird cramping pains in your chest. You head over to your computer and type the symptom "chest pain" into your preferred search engine. The first result to pop up is heart attack. Your curiosity escalates into anxiety as you scroll through pages that list heart attack symptoms as the exact ones you're having. More than likely, what you're experiencing isn't a heart attack at all but maybe something as simple as heartburn. Something that could have been treated by taking an antacid has resulted in an ER visit that has now cost you thousands of dollars. This is an example of cyberchondria. Cyberchondria refers to people that use the Internet to look up medical information and use the information to diagnosis themselves.
BODY I
Cyberchondria causes a lot of people to self-misdiagnosis themselves. According to MSNBC.com, “Although medical websites such as Web MD and Mayo Clinic provide key insights into identifying and treating various illnesses, experts warn they also make it easy for people to misdiagnosis health problems and can lead to “cyberchondria,” or anxiety borne from online health-related searches”. After reading symptoms online a person may start to think they have those symptoms, creating a delusion in their minds. For example, a person goes to a search engine and type in “fever with cough”…instead of them assuming it’s just a simple cold, they start reading the symptoms of the flu...and thinking to themselves “I did have the shakes and was feeling cold earlier”, forgetting he/she had the air conditioning turned downed when getting out of the shower or “saying I have been feeling fatigue for the past couple of weeks”, when the real cause of their fatigue has been from doing the extreme intense workout Insanity for the past couple of weeks. With all these worries and concerns leads a person to assume the worse. According to American Medical News,