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LONDON: Patients are not the only people turning to the Internet for medical information.
Searching the World Wide Web with engines such as Google may also help doctors to diagnose perplexing medical conditions, Australian researchers said on Friday.
“Our study suggests that in difficult cases, it is often useful to google for a diagnosis,” said Hangwi Tang, of the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane.
To test how good Google is, Tang and his colleagues selected three to five search terms for 26 difficult-to-diagnose illnesses reported in a medical journal and did a Google search.
The disorders ranged from cirrhosis and the degenerative brain disorder, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, to cat-scratch disease, infective encephalitis and obscure conditions such as Henoch-Scholein purpura, Churg-Strauss syndrome and extrinsic allergic alveolitis.
After recording the top ranked answers that seemed to fit the symptoms and comparing them with the correct diagnosis, they found the Google searches came up with the right answer in 15 out of the 26 cases – an accuracy rate of 58 per cent.
The researchers did add a caveat, however: The results from Google are only as good as the knowledge base of the searcher – a caution that especially applies to patients who try to self-diagnose their problems.
“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,” Tang said in the study published online by the British Medical Journal.