Doctors to google for tricky cases
Google.. everyone uses it – why not doctor?The british medical journal suggests that Google is likely to provide the correct diagnosis in conditions with unique symptoms.Doctors in doubt could use the search engine to research unique conditions and help them reach a diagnosis. Two australian doctors put Google to the test by entering symptoms of 26 difficult cases to see how accurate an aid to diagnosis it was. And in 58% of cases using the search engine led to the correct diagnosis.
Among the correctly diagnosed conditions were Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the hormonal disorder Cushing’s syndrome, acute chest syndrome – a complication of sickle cell disease – and the auto-immune disease Churg-Strauss syndrome, a rare condition that can affect the blood vessels, the lungs, nerves, and other parts of the body.