A University College London study found out that if using computers to find information about their chronic disease improves the medical knowledge of people and provides them with feelings of social support, there is no evidence that cyber-medicine helps people change their behavior. It may even leave them in worse health.

It might be because when they learn of small, but important, statistical effects of a treatment people become less frightened and thus unmotivated to change the way they might if a doctor told a person with diabetes to control her sugar or face death.

A second reason might be that knowledge-seekers become so steeped in information from the Internet they make treatment choices on their own, contradicting advice from their doctors.

Details in Eurekalert.