Sometimes the internet is a dark and dangerous place.
There are people who might tell you they want to cut your toes off and feed them to you when you unwittingly share an opinion; there are people who steal naked photographs of women; and there are websites that allow you to self-diagnose.
I'm a hypochondriac. I know I am a hypochondriac and that doesn't change anything.
Any slight change in what I perceive to be the normal functioning of my body and I am reduced to a hysterical, distracted mess.
An ulcer on my tongue can be equally as frightening to me as the prospect of coughing up blood or finding scales all over my body.
I know it's not rational, and that it is almost completely entirely my imagination, but that doesn't stop me from worrying.
I tend to panic about my health when I have other things on my mind. If I am stressed out about writing essays, giving presentations or sitting exams it is almost guaranteed that something will go wrong with my health.
When this happens I become entirely useless. The stress that was previously focused on my university work then directs itself towards my perceived health problem and is magnified by 110%.
The incredible thing is, something can start off as almost nothing but by the time I have given it any thought it has become a permanent, life-altering problem that will definitely be incurable and excruciating.
My mind is all-powerful, and when it comes down to it I can convince myself of anything, primarily that I am going to die or that I will never be able to play guitar again.
Now I know Googling symptoms is bad. I know it never does anything but make everything worse.
At first, maybe, you will come up with some simple problem that countless other people have asked about on forums, but inevitably you will find some link to some rare and horrific illness which you convince yourself you are in the later stages of.
It is so hard, though, when one bit of you is twitching incessantly, not to just have a quick poke around on the internet.
Sure it could just be dehydration or stress, but it could just as easily be ten other much more frightening things. And then you get trapped: you know looking it up stresses you out, but you also don't want to not look it up and have it be something really serious that you don't get treated because you think it's just paranoia.
It is an endless cycle. Obviously the internet is the worst place you can go when you think you have a health problem.
Everyone has different bodies, different medical histories, different interpretations of what is actually happening to their bodies.
A website can show you a list of symptoms, but often you can start out with only one symptom and talk yourself into having the rest of them.
There is no nuance to a medical website and it can ultimately do you more harm than good.
Once I broke my foot and searched ''how easy is it to break your foot?'' and was led to believe I would be in unbearable agony had I broken my foot, so I didn't go to the doctor for over a month and now my foot hurts every time it rains.
Another time, a website listing the natural healing properties of nettles (I don't even really believe in that stuff, but when there is an essay to be written ...) led me to a forum where a young man was complaining he had tried to heal anal warts using apple cider vinegar.
In this instance I wasn't even sick, but reading that did me a lot more harm than it did good.
I guess what I am saying is that I am an insufferable hypochondriac who will not be helped, regardless of whether or not I have access to a wealth of internet resources on every disease known to man.
But for those with a thirst for knowledge and a propensity for anxiety, I would recommend staying far, far away from the internet and self-diagnosing.
Millie Lovelock is a Dunedin student.
