Dr Tang says the study was driven by personal curiosity after noticing how patients and doctors alike were using Google to diagnose difficult cases.More details at ABC News.
In one example he had a patient whose father used the search engine to correctly diagnose that his son had the rare circulatory condition -Paget-von Schrötter syndrome.
Dr Tang and Dr Ng selected 26 difficult cases presented in the New England Journal of Medicine, including Cushing's syndrome, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, encephalitis and cirrhosis.
They then plugged the symptoms of each case into the search engine to come up with a diagnosis.
When these diagnoses were compared with the correct published diagnoses, the researchers found that Google got it right 58 per cent of the time.
Doctors diagnose diseases online with Google
Posted on Friday, November 10 2006 @ 22:43 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck