Increased Google Health Searches Show Effects of Recession

With the beginning of the Affordable Care Act, a new team of researchers are working to examine the relationship between health search terms and Google.

According to John W. Ayers from San Diego State University and Benjamin Althouse of the Santa Fe Institute, they found that when looking at Google search patterns within the United States, higher search terms regarding health were seen during recession periods.

The team defined the Great Recession as the time from December 2008 to 2011, in which they found that more than 200 million additional health searchers had been conducted at this time.

Researchers focused on five key words, including the following: heart, headache, pain, chest and stomach. These words were indicative of the most common health problems faced by individuals using the web. They then compiled a list of 343 sypmtoms searches based on the five root words. When they compared the data, the researchers found that searchers such as "stomach ulcer" spiked dramatically, by up to 228 percent during recessional periods.

The researchers then grouped the health ailments into themes to find that headache searches were 41 percent higher than expected, along with hernia searches at 37 percent and chest pain and heart arrhythmias at 35 and 32 percent, respectively. 

As a recession is typically defined as an economic slump or slowdown, researchers believe that the searches show, along with previous findings, the need for safety in a time of uncertainty. 

What do you think? 

More information regarding the study can be found via the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.