Hypochondria is a condition where a person, due to his own imagination, remains extremely worried about the state of his health even if the medical reports declare him as normal and healthy.
Now doctors, thanks to the growth of Internet, have to deal with another form of Hypochondria like disorder that they refer to as Cyberchondria.
Cyberchondria, in simple English, is wrong self-diagnosis using a search engine. You type your symptoms in Google and, based on what you see on the Internet, self-assume that you are sick.
Paul Valley compares the two health disorders – “If hypochondria is the excessive fear of illness, then cyberchondria is that fuelled by the huge amount of medical information that is now available on the internet.”
NYT further discusses Cyberchondria in detail using the research study [PDF] done by Microsoft that says “self-diagnosis by search engine frequently leads Web searchers to conclude the worst about what ails them.”