Health: Click To Get Sick?

People who get medical advice from the Web actually get worse, a study shows

There's a running gag in Floater, Calvin Trillin's 1980 comic novel about a newsmagazine that sounds a lot like TIME, in which the medicine writer comes down with the symptoms of whatever disease he's writing about that week. I was reminded of that hapless writer when I read about a new study out of University College London that found that people who use the Web to get information about their chronic diseases often wind up in worse shape than before they logged on.

Could the medical information on the Internet actually be making people ill?

Not exactly, says Dr. Elizabeth Murray...

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