If you look up your symptoms and they point you towards a certain illness, you may not be correct, but the symptoms have been there before. So even if the cause for your symptoms turns out to be different, I don't think behaviour in the patient will change as much.
Besides, even when the patien didn't try to selfdiagnose, their symptoms might point towards several illnesses. This is why in the beginning of therapy docs evaluate their patient, and their working theories may change over time.
Psychiatric diagnoses are made with time and extensive interviewing. Usually you need symptoms to be present, persistent and having a negative effect on the patient's life for a diagnosis.
You do raise a very good point though because there is so much more subjectivity diagnosis can take a long time, a part of it is trying to rule out what you describe.
What is pdoc?
Your premise is wrong. Just because you belief something doesn't make it real. For how it can be figured out: there are brain tests, it's called psychometrics. These tests are specifically designed to be resistant to "faking it". For some diagnoses, they also use data such as third party accounts, teachers notes, etc.
Psychiatrist often employ the differential diagnosis as a particular symptom can be in multiple illnesses. So the patient thinking they have some one symptom is not really good basis for diagnosis.
It's pretty rare for someone to pretend to have symptoms they don't have, and if someone is doing that, they still have a problem that they need help with.
Your question, phrased clinically is would I be diagnosed with Diagnosis X or hypochondria, now called illness anxiety disorder?
The answer depends on the interview. If you said you started noticing these symptoms right around the time you read about the disorder and don't remember them existing before hand, propably you'd get the illness anxiety. If you did not mention the correlation, more likely to not get that...
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