Markos
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 Posted: 11/14/06 - 05:44 Post subject: Doctors use Google to diagnose unusual cases |
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Australian doctors from the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane decided to test Google’s accuracy in representing information regarding a number of symptoms doctors typed in the search field.
The doctors googled the symptoms of 26 cases and the search came up with 15 right diagnosis.
Google doesn’t find the correct diagnosis, it offers a few diagnoses among which professionals can choose the right one according to the symptoms and appropriate tests. This is how they did it in the study.
Among the cases the google correctly diagnosed were very rare Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), the hormonal condition Cushing's syndrome and the auto-immune disorder Churg-Strauss syndrome.
The researchers report that the Google could be used as an “aid” in diagnosing conditions with unique symptoms and signs. While doctors carry two million facts in his/her memory to assist in diagnosing illnesses, the Google has more than three billion medical articles.
However, not everyone can do this. It takes an expert to for proper searching and distinguishing right from wrong information. This means that patients would have less success in trying to diagnose themselves on the internet.
The researchers believe that Google will become a useful tool in clinical medicine and that doctors in training should become proficient in their use. Google is reliable only in those cases when a professional with good medical knowledge uses it.
What concerns me is that those medical professionals might lose some of the two million medical facts they carry in their heads since we know how technology influence our memory. By relying on the technology, we forget to use our own brains. |
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