Google your disease

Two clinicians from Brisbane have tested how well Google makes difficult diagnoses. They were prompted to do it by the father of a 16 year old boy with a rare set of symptoms which were perplexing the doctors. The boy’s dad trotted out the correct diagnosis and treatment saying he’d just Googled his son’s symptoms.

The doctors did a trial to see how accurate Google actually was. They took case studies from the New England Journal of Medicine which are published as lessons and brain teasers for doctors. Using carefully selected search terms, they got the right diagnosis in nearly 60% of cases.

They concluded that Googling was a bit better than tossing a coin . It’s likely that it works best for unusual combinations of symptoms where the numbers of possible diagnoses are limited. It also seemed to depend on selecting the most specific words to put into the search engine.