Google Health Diagnosis Helps Doctors

In an extremely interesting study published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) recently, a team of Australian doctors of Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane tested the effectiveness and accuracy of the search engine Google in diagnosing illnesses.

The doctors 'Googled' the symptoms of 26 cases for this study and were pleasantly surprised when in 15 of the cases, the results came up with the right diagnosis!

The researchers are of the opinion that Google can be an extremely "useful aid" in diagnosing illnesses.

Doctors have to carry a huge amount of medical information in their heads, almost two million facts in their memory to assist in diagnosing illnesses. As such, the search engine may offer useful help in diagnosing an unusual case.

Google is the most popular search engine on the web, and offers access to more than three billion medical articles; searching for health information on the web is one of the most common uses.

In each of the 26 cases hard-to-diagnose cases which had been published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), the researchers selected three to five search terms from each case and did a Google search without knowing the correct diagnoses.

They then recorded the three diagnoses that were ranked most prominently and selected the one which seemed most relevant to the signs and then compared the results with the correct diagnoses as published in the journal.

They found that Google found the correct diagnosis in just over half of the cases and among these were Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), the hormonal condition Cushing's syndrome and the auto-immune disorder Churg-Strauss syndrome.

The team was led by Dr. Hangwi Tang, a respiratory and sleep physician, who says Google could be a "useful aid" in diagnosing conditions with unique symptoms and signs that can easily be used as search terms.

But Dr. Tang also says a successful search needed a "human expert" user, and therefore patients would have less success trying to diagnose themselves on the internet.

Once again, Google has done it yet again! MSN and Yahoo must again be getting nightmares and sleepless nights ;-)




Tags: Google, Googled, Health, Research, Search Engine, MSN, Yahoo, Sleep, Nightmares, Brisbane, Doctors, Australia, Diagnosis, Medical, Illness, syndrome,