Students who learn ”frightening diseases” for the first time routinely experience vivid delusions of
having contracted such diseases.
In the past, this psychological condition was limited to medical students because information
about most diseases was not easily available to the general public. In recent years, it became
widespread and exacerbated by an easy access to health information on the Internet. Nowadays
everyone can find a description of symptoms and complications associated with any disease online.
Specific claim
It’s not possible that the fear by itself had such tangible consequences. How could people’s state of
mind have the devastating effect on the health care system?
Even during non-crisis time, nosophobia had a huge detrimental effect on the health care system.
In September 2018, researchers from Imperial College London concluded that nosophobia is leading
to a health anxiety epidemic in the UK.
According to the authors, 20% of appointments at the UK’s National Health Service were
related to internet-induced irrational concerns. The study estimated the costs to the public health
care system of such visits to be at £420 million per year ”in outpatient appointments alone, with
millions more spent on needless tests and scans”.
The access to medical information on the Internet is feeding a ”silent epidemic” of medical
anxiety, and the fear of contamination can lead to ”mass psychogenic illness” in which people
avoid things like gluten, sugar, planes, or windmills simply because others do.
The excessive use of Internet medical sites fuels health anxiety and it is not hard to imagine
the effects of this condition when amplified by the alarming and by an order of magnitude wrong
estimates by health authorities and round-the-clock media coverage of one specific disease.
2.9
Zero-risk bias
Zero-risk bias is an irrationally strong preference for situations with absolute certainty. People
prefer one particular risk being eliminated instead of merely mitigated, even at a high price and
increasing other risks.
Most of risks cannot be reduced to zero, but people tend to overweigh the value of certainty
in comparison to very small risk and are ready to pay a lot for solely the reassurance of complete
safety, even if the promise of safety is unfounded.
Businesses often take advantage of the zero-risk bias. Customers are willing to pay a high
premium to sign the allegedly ”risk-free” contract that gives them all possible guarantees, forgetting
that the major risk of impossibility to enforce the contract remains.
Another example from the corporate world is the usually detrimental decision to eliminate risk
in one manager’s department at the expense of increased risk for the larger organization.
Specific claim
I understand that the virus is not as dangerous as they paint it, but I want to be sure that I’m safe,
so I expect the government to deal with it at any cost.
Zero-risk bias is especially harmful on the line of citizen-state interrelation. It often manifests
itself in cases concerning health, safety, and the environment where decision makers are urged to
resolve a specific problem to its complete eradication instead of mitigation. Usually the popular
demands to further reduce the risk can only be harmful. Unfortunately the decision makers un-
dergo pressure. Otherwise, they are lambasted for inaction.
We will never live in a sanitized world, nor is it a healthy objective. The risk of infections
cannot be eliminated. It can only be minimized by systematic policies, preparations, steady devel-
opment of vaccines, better control over pharmaceutical companies, recommending basic hygiene,
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