It happens to everyone: A weird bump shows up on your butt, leg, or any fill-the-blank body part. First thing you do? Start Googling. One hour later, you’ve emerged from the black hole of medical minutiae circulating the internet convinced that you have a rare form of cancer and only months left to live.
“Prior to internet content, we had to go to the library to check all this stuff out,” says Jay Parkinson, founder and CEO of Sherpaa, an online healthcare company that fields thousands of patients’ inquiries on a weekly basis. Now we can cut straight to panic without even leaving the house.
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We asked Parkinson and Neal Barnard, founder and president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, to reveal the health scares that strike the most irrational fear into the hearts of misinformed people everywhere.
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