Does Google now own our bodies?

Does Google now own our bodies?

Does Google now own our bodies?

We all have ‘mortuary inclinations’. But these are great days for the worried well. Open any newspaper and you will find an outbreak of contrary, confusing, half-nonsensical stories that feed health anxiety.

The internet is the tool par excellence for those with a twitch or a wart or a chill, and the democratisation of the medical lexicon has caused acute anxiety to doctors, facing them with a doleful loss of status. A few years ago it was routine for them to snarl at patients: ‘I suppose you’ve been looking it up on the internet.’

Now what is more usual is a swallowed and hasty explanation, broken off with a resigned flap of the hand: ‘Well, you can look it up, you will do anyway.’

In the days before internet information and misinformation became available, patients often came away from a consultation with the feeling that they did not own their own bodies, that they were in some way owned by the doctor or the NHS. Now perhaps Google owns our bodies; it is possible to have access, at a keystroke, to a dazing plurality of opinion. There is an illness out there for every need, a disease to fit any symptom. And it is not just individuals who manufacture disease

There is an illness out there for every need, a disease to fit any symptom. And it is not just individuals who manufacture disease. As drug patents expire, the pharmacological companies invent new illnesses, such as social anxiety disorder, for which an otherwise obsolete formulation can be prescribed. For this ruse to work, the patient must accept a description of himself as sick, not just odd; so shyness, for example, becomes a pathology, not just an inconvenient character trait.

We need not be in pain, or produce florid symptoms, to benefit from the new, enveloping, knowledge-based hypochondria. We are all subtly wrong in some way, most of the time: ill at ease in the world. We can all stand a bit of readjustment, physical or mental, a bit of fine-tuning. As we pursure our lifelong itch for self-improvement. Source Hllary Mantel LRB