Are students developing bad habits?: Not nail biting, cursing or talking too much, but do you self diagnose?

  Older movies portray doctors making house calls, but in the modern world, that doesn’t happen too often. Our medical technology has evolved enough that now, not only can we go to an emergency room or after hours care, we can also self diagnose.

  WebMD is a website dedicated to informing people about conditions, diseases and disabilities, and how they are treated. You can conduct a Google search for any sickness, and thousands of websites may come up, but what separates WebMD from other sites, is its most popular feature, Symptom Checker.

  The premise of this feature is that it allows you to type in any symptom, and it will come back with a list of possible conditions. All you have to do is put your gender and age. As a test, I entered  ‘female’ and 18-24 for my age. I decided that for symptoms, I would input things that a typical college student may exhibit after a long day of classes: a headache (probably from reading), throbbing feet (from walking all over a college campus), stiffness in the fingers (more commonly known as writer’s cramp), fatigue (from lack of sleep), and tiring quickly (from, well frankly, long lectures.)

  The conditions that came back shocked me. The diagnosis included Multiple Sclerosis (an autoimmune disease where the neurotransmitters stop functioning properly), Anemia (a disease of the blood that occurs when the body doesn’t have enough red blood cells), a fractured foot, and Carbon Monoxide poisoning. This was just the top of the list.

  Multiple Sclerosis doesn’t typically occur in anyone under forty, but it isn’t unheard. Either way, only three of the symptoms I listed matched the list of forty-one symptoms for MS. For Anemia, only two symptoms matched the fourteen listed, and frankly, I think you’d know if you had a fractured foot, and you probably wouldn’t live long enough to check WebMD if you had Carbon Monoxide poisoning.

  Bodies are like cars and, sleep is like gas for us. So, if you only fill your tank a quarter of the way, you’re not going to get very far. Hence, before your next self diagnosis session, take a nap. Rest just may be the antidote you’ve been looking for before logging on to the computer.