Do you turn to the Internet to look up symptoms of a disease or condition? How about to diagnose yourself or someone you know?

You’re not alone, according to the Health Online 2013 report out from Pew Internet & American Life Project today. According to their most recent survey of Americans, 35 percent of us have gone online to figure out a medical or health condition.

And, perhaps surprising to no one, 72 percent of Internet users have looking for health information online and most people — 77 percent — start their inquiry at a search engine, like Google or Bing.

Let me preface this by stating that I was born in 1985 and that makes me 27 years old. Arguably because of this, my life has been defined by the rapidly changing technology of the 20th century.

I recall the first time I encountered a computer — it really was an encounter as the machine looked rather frightening to my 10-year-old eyes. It was grey and weighed at least 25 pounds. It took what felt like forever (minutes — in its later years, hours) to load.

And it made a strange ticking noise, a repetitive sound not unlike the clock that hung in our living room, or the motion of my foot hitting the side of the metal desk as I waited for the noise the machine made once the screen finally appeared. I loved that noise. If the computer could talk I was certain it was telling me, whispering among the ticking, Welcome Home, Natalie! Enjoy your stay!

It was 1995. My two siblings and I fought over that large machine, forcing my parents to give us each an allotted amount of time. We cried and we kicked once 30 minutes had passed, 45 minutes if the gods were smiling down on us or my mother was taking a nap.

In his book Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep, author David K. Randall calls sleep “one of the dirty little secrets of science.” That’s because despite spending almost a third of our lives sleeping, we don’t really know much about the process of sleep.

In fact, Randall, a senior reporter at Reuters, notes that sleep is one of the youngest fields in science. Until the 1950s, researchers believed that our brains remained quiet during slumber.

But the discovery of the stages of sleep shattered this perspective. For instance, our brains are just as active in REM sleep — aptly named rapid eye movement because our eyes shift rapidly against our lids — as they are when we’re awake.

In Dreamland, Randall shares a slew of these fascinating, surprising and eye-opening facts, anecdotes and research studies. These are a few curious tidbits from his book.

One of the most difficult challenges to overcome when dealing with a mental illness is the temptation of the excuse.

With a psychiatric diagnosis comes an excuse for everything. Any bad behavior, lack of motivation, or failure can be passed off as a symptom or the result of an episode. The excuse is always available. Don’t take it.

No one’s asking you to take responsibility for having a mental illness. That’s not your fault.

But you have to take responsibility for your actions and for your recovery. Sure, unexpected things happen as a result of serious mental illness, but most of our behavior is within our control, or at least our influence. And the behavior that most influences our wellness is treatment compliance.

As soon as Halloween ends we are reminded that Christmas is creeping its way back into our lives. It always seems to arrive much too soon, doesn’t it? The month of November quickly feels as if it’s defined by December.

I’m not a huge fan of the holiday season. When I was 19, I worked in a grocery store. I’m pretty sure my relative disdain for the season started while working a cash register between aisles of Santa-shaped chocolates and overpriced eggnog. I tolerated the crowds of people who purchased produce and cookies and I smiled, my irritation level peaking each time I was asked if the store sold organic carrots.

The customer, after all, is always right.

But the dreadful repetition of Christmas music drove me to surrender my apron midway through December.

More than five years ago, I penned a piece entitled Reliability and Validity in a Web 2.0 World. It spoke about the concerns of gathering data from biased samples — without first understanding in what ways, exactly, those samples may be biased.

Now, with the ubiquity of apps — downloadable programs for people’s smartphones — I’m seeing the same problem arise. Developers and entrepreneurs are pursuing data from these apps without understanding the basics of good, reliable, scientific data collection. And why it matters — especially when you start wanting to analyze all of this “big data” (a somewhat silly term… in epidemiology, for instance, scientists just call it “data”).

Can personal health data be collected by these apps without bias, and somehow be transformed into measuring something bigger?

A client shared his frustration over not achieving more in his life, all those things he thought he would have done by now. I suggested that his struggle with low self-esteem would be helped if he stopped comparing himself to others.

This man, like many I know, deals heroically every day with the special needs challenges in his family. He and his wife step up in a non-traditional, focused, determined manner with love and spirit that is hard for outsiders to imagine. He is the frog in the pot, so it is nearly impossible for him to see how exceptional he is.

His reaction to me was: “Are you asking me to lower my expectations?”

No, I said, I’m asking you to blow them up, destroy them, obliterate them to dust. I hate that term: ‘lower expectations’, (can you tell?) as if by thinking differently we are less ourselves instead of more.

When my first daughter was born — nearly 15 years ago — I remember a level of anxiety that I carried with me wherever I was and whatever I was doing.

Was I doing things right? Would my decisions as a parent serve her well? Would she grow up to be a well-adjusted person, at ease and self-confident?

Being in the mental health field, these things were of primary importance to me. I would often ask myselff: Was I stimulating her enough? Was I providing her with an optimal amount of external stimuli? Was I stimulating her too much, interfering with her ability to soothe herself?

The answers from developmental and parenting experts were contradictory and confusing. They ranged from advice, such as never to put your baby in a crib (the equivalent of being “put behind bars”), to the need to teach your baby to self-soothe by several months of age. (Otherwise she will have difficulty developing a sense of independence and self-reliance.)

I was, as many new mothers are, vulnerable to the “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” that were expressed all around me, both from experts and from other new mothers.

Last week, sniffling and certain that I might perish at any moment, I made an appointment with my doctor. I am an impatient person. This is why I make appointments when seeing my physician. I assume he will stick to a schedule and I will enter and exit, with a prescription in hand, within fifteen minutes. A nice, compact, amount of time.

This time I was left waiting. Children screamed and people who may be as impatient as I am moved their legs up and down rapidly. Everyone made a socially concerted effort not to look at each other.

I decided to settle in and read. At the rate the room was moving — sort of like a turnover rate at a bad job — it was clear I had at least 30 minutes longer to wait.

I have always found ‘literature’ in doctors’ offices disconcerting, though equally fascinating. After all, where can you find a magazine on parenting (a beautiful woman is holding a golden-haired toddler) and a celebrity magazine (apparently, Angelina Jolie has adopted five children from Nigeria) sitting side by side?

Want to feel better about your body?  Stop reading fashion magazines.

It’s the holidays.  Magazines focus on our waistlines and ways to survive the season while keeping a slender figure. I’m all for good health, but we’re frequently sold an image, product or diet that does not always result in good mental or physical health, particularly for women.

What’s your ideal weight?  In one alarming study, adolescent girls described their ideal girl as 5 feet 7 inches tall and weighing a mere 100 pounds.

This ideal is — at best — unhealthy and, for many, anorexic. 

Have you told your doctor about the other medications or drugs you regularly take? If you’re on an antidepressant, you probably should.

If you’re taking non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), you may be less likely to experience the beneficial effects of the most commonly prescribed classes of antidepressants, SSRIs (such as Paxil, Zoloft and Prozac).

NSAIDs include ibuprofin (such as Advil, Motrin, and Midol), naproxen sodium (such as Aleve) and good ole aspirin.

According to an article appearing in the recently published The Carlat Psychiatry Report, that was the surprising conclusion of a paper published last year (Warnerschmidt Jl et al, Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 2011;108:9262–9267), and a newly released report reaches a similar conclusion.

During the holidays, we often hear stories about how much people are shopping. In fact, you can’t turn on the news on Black Friday (or the Monday after, or the day after that, or the day after that…) without hearing about holiday shopping.

What you don’t hear enough about are the people who are down and out, in need of our help. Sure, it was great there was a 12-12-12 concert for victims of Hurricane Sandy. But what about everyday folks who just have fallen on temporary hard times?

That’s why The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund warms my heart. For the past 100 years, the Fund has provided direct assistance to children, families and the elderly in New York. Each day during the months of December and January, they highlight a story from their Fund. In a city of over 8 million people, it’s not hard to find people in need.

Today’s story is about a man who worked for over a decade as a home health aide, over 75 hours every two weeks. When he was most in need due to a kidney infection, however, he found his own health insurance wouldn’t cover his medical expenses. Which in turn sent him into a spiraling depression.