“Dr. Google, I am in pain”—Global Internet searches associated with pain: A retrospective analysis of Google Trends data
Description
Objective. The Internet enables immediate access to health-related information. We aimed to rank the most common locations of pain among Google users globally and locally and analyze secular and seasonal trends in pain-related searches in the years 2004-2019. Design. Retrospective infodemiological study. Setting. We used data generated by Google Trends (GT) to identify and analyze global interest and the time course of topics (n = 24) related to locations of pain. Subjects. Google users. Methods. We analyzed secular trends and time series decomposition to identify seasonal variations. We also calculated the interest in all topics with reference to the relative search volume (RSV) of “Abdominal pain”. The dataset was generated using a freely available tool Google Trends: https://trends.google.com/trends/?geo=US All details of the retrieval of the data are described in the manuscript. Name of the files refers to the name of tables and figures in the manuscript