The Internet Convinced Me I'm Pregnant

I have been one acquainted with the night, and internet-fueled pregnancy scares.

Anyone with a womb and a similarly neurotic personality will know the feeling. It's been nearly a month since your last period, and you're PMS-ing pretty hard. Except maybe you're not. Maybe you're pregnant. So you think about it more and more, and you start googling the symptoms. You fall down the WebMD wormhole, and slowly but surely, with every list and forum post you read, you start believing your worst fears are coming true.

"Cyberchondria," the term used to describe internet-facilitated hypochondria, sounds gimmicky, but for many it remains as real as ever. A 2013 Pew Research Centre study found that 72 percent of internet users have looked for health advice online, and one 2012 survey revealed that speculative "general health" websites were more popular than government ones. In Belgium last year a campaign titled "Don't Google It" was launched to warn against cyberchondria.

Purported "health" sites can take a disturbingly flippant attitude to pregnancy (Google "Am I Pregnant? Quiz" and the results are neverending). The process plays out like nightmarish flowchart quiz, the kind you find in magazines for teenage girls, except that every line leads to the same answer.

Years ago I remember googling "three pregnancy tests negative no period" one time and accidentally sharing it to Facebook (I turned off "social sharing" after that). Even now, on occasion, I find myself skipping between tabs at 3am, comparing WebMD and the Mayo Clinic and Planned Parenthood, along with an account of a broken condom from some anonymous woman on Reddit. The internet is full of paranoid women waiting for their periods to arrive.

Blame poor sex education in schools. Blame shows fueled by the morbid curiosity and abject terror of sexually active women, like I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant, or late night reruns of Teen Mom. We all know those lurid magazine tales of teenage recklessness and hysterical pregnancy, but it's easy enough not to take them seriously in their tabloid context. What the internet does, however, is bombard you with information, some of it useful, some of it utterly misleading, with reputable and disreputable sites presented side by side thanks to SEO rather than their medical credentials.

One solution might be to hold health apps and websites to higher standards. I spoke to Jason Maude, founder of Isabel Healthcare, which has created two symptom checkers, one aimed at clinicians and nurses, and another, more recently developed app aimed at patients. In both cases, results are mined from a library of medical textbooks rather than crowdsourced opinion. Named for Maude's daughter after doctors misdiagnosed a life-threatening disease she had as a child (she thankfully recovered), Isabel is used in over 100 American hospitals, and trials have shown a 96 percent rate of accuracy.

Maude approves of symptom checkers as long as they are properly designed for a specific purpose: "Bear in mind that Google, the most commonly used symptom checker, was not designed to do this specific job," he said. "It searches everything brilliantly but does a poor job of being a clinical tool to help with diagnosis. Other well known symptom checkers were not designed as clinical tools but rather ways to get users to search their content and spend more time on their site, generating more advertising. It's a bad idea to use something as a tool for a job that it wasn't designed or tested to do."

It's ironic how closely the symptoms of PMS resemble those of pregnancy: mood swings, food cravings, lack of energy, and irritability, likely only increased by all the paranoid hours wasted browsing. Stress delays periods. it feels like it can only be a matter of time till those same tabloids start reporting on "internet-induced hysterical pregnancy."

Weighing up the heart-thumping paranoia these websites invoke is enough to make taking an actual pregnancy test seem like the less-scary option (you can buy them in bulk for pretty cheap on Amazon, then share them with friends for hours of paranoid fun).

Possibly the worst thing you can do is rely on the wisdom of the crowd, the online hive mind which alternately trolls and doles out advice on sites like Reddit, Quora, Ask Metafilter and, most notoriously, Yahoo Answers, home of the bleach and Pine Sol pregnancy tests and four-month retroactive sperm.

Sites for teenagers are predictably full of fear and confusion, taking the place of the agony aunt columns I read growing up. Unlike Yahoo answers, Scarleteen is an independent sex education website, a commendably unbiased, sex-positive resource for young people. But reading through its archive of reader questions is cringey, in the way that only teenagers can be: there's the guy who wants to sneak his girlfriend abortion pills, the girl who worries that sperm lives on bars of soap, the other girl who believes you can get pregnant by sharing a hot tub.

Questions unintentionally follow a template: a young female user mentions that she has only recently started having sex with her boyfriend and that they used contraception, but that she's still scared she's pregnant. Undercurrents of guilt show through: she says she knows she was stupid (for having sex) and she knows she's being stupid (for asking this question). It's an uncomfortably familiar routine for anyone who's ever been a self-conscious teenage girl.

Maude disagreed with the view that health apps take advantage of hypochondria: "Patients need to become much better informed about their own health so they can work with the doctor rather than just passively do what they are told … As one patient safety expert said recently 'the doctors need to get off their pedestals and the patients need to get off their knees.'"

A stranger on the internet will never know your body as well as you do. And if you turn to Yahoo Answers for answers on sexual health, dear reader, then I am truley sorry for your lots.