Researchers have found that six out of ten difficult medical cases can be solved using the internet as a reference for diagnosis. Google's web search has proven to be the established and accepted tool for sourcing this vital information.
Google is the most popular search engine on the web, with access to more than three billion medical articles - and searching for health information is one of the most common uses of the web.
Medical knowledge is progressing fast; and gone are the days when doctors had to mentally span millions of medical facts to cover all possible treatments and ailments. The latest tools for sourcing this information are simply the net's offerings.
For example, when searching the term 'Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease' 1,140,000 results are returned.
This method of information gathering was first put to the test by a team of Australian doctors. The doctors used Google search to identify the nature of symptoms for 26 difficult medical cases from the New England Journal of Medicine. Using Google, the researchers found the right diagnosis on 15 out of 26 cases. This shows a very impressive level of accuracy, since we are talking about the most difficult cases in the medical profession; but it must be made clear that, while Google is a helpful resource, the search engine simply cannot be used with 100% reliance for all cases.
The researchers said:
"We suspect that using Google to search for a diagnosis is likely to be more effective with unique symptoms and signs that can be easily used as search terms... Searches are less likely to be successful in complex diseases with non-specific symptoms or common diseases with rare presentations.''
Professor Mayur Lakhani from the Royal College of General Practitioners commented:
"The internet is in no way a replacement for doctors."
Useful information on even the rarest medical syndromes can now be found and digested within a matter of minutes. Google shall now be seen as a means of support for doctors and their patients, as well as a resource to help gather information.
With these recent findings, it is evident that Google has surpassed their original company mission - to provide people with an invaluable information resource - as it can now essentially be used to resolve matters of life and death.
