Doctors told to Google diagnoses
Doctors should turn to Google for diagnoses, the report says
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Friday, 10, Nov 2006 12:01
Using Google is an effective way to come up with diagnoses for difficult patients, doctors have been told.
Researchers from the Princess Alexandra hospital in Brisbane, Australia, picked some of the more difficult cases to diagnose and tested the world's most used internet search engine against one of the most respected medical journals.
The experts chose three to five common search terms for the 24 cases and then conducted blind searches using Google, before ranking the results in terms of frequency of return.
In 58 per cent of cases (15 out of 24) Google was able to arrive at the same conclusion as the New England Journal of Medicine in 2005, including for conditions such as Cushing's syndrome, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and Hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy.
The results led researchers to conclude that Google can often be a useful tool for doctors in a world of ever-expanding medical knowledge.
"Useful information on even the rarest medical syndromes can now be found and digested within a matter of minutes," the doctors stated.
"Our study suggests that in difficult diagnostic cases, it is often useful to 'Google for a diagnosis'. Web-based search engines such as Google are becoming the latest tools in clinical medicine, and doctors in training need to become proficient in their use."
However, the doctors stressed that the usefulness of Google is only valuable when matched with a researcher with a deep knowledge of medical conditions.
Google failed to match the journal's diagnosis for nine conditions, including West Nile fever and Endometriosis.
The study appeared in the British Medical Journal.