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Google Used To Diagnose Disease
dptalia writes "About 20% of all diseases are misdiagnosed, a percentage that has remained steady since the 1930s. However, scientists have discovered that by inputting the key symptoms into Google they can get the correct diagnosis about 58% of the time. For rare and unusual diseases, this provides doctors the information they need to get a correct cure. Of course, Google is only as good as its knowledge base, and its users, so this isn't a cure for everything."
What the blurb doesn't say, how much of the 58% google gets right overlaps with the 20% doctors get wrong, if at all.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
So the conclusion is: Google performs worse than docters. And that was using input from trained doctors. Is it a slow news day or is it time again to boost Google's stock value?
There should be a global wiki for medical professionals searchable by symptoms.
The contribution weight of better/senior/more respected doctors should be higher compared to new graduates. The wide open public should not be allowed to write, but should be allowed to read it.
This way better healthcare will be available in poor countries with Internet access, people will be able to double-check their diagnosis online and better doctors will be able to make a name for themselves the way CowboyNeal has.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Is anyone else finished smoking the Google drug? They are another big public company using some of the most advanced advertising techniques we've seen to sell cosumers more stuff. Lets hear it for TV ads while we're at it! Oh yeah, and they censor searches from China, including those about one of the worst massacres of our time. Yay.
If there was a publically available performance/competency grade for doctors online so I could just google for a good doctor in my area rather than hoping some med student hits paydirt with an 'I feel lucky search'
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I'm just moments away from the answer.
e rection
http://www.google.com/search?&q=Viagra+four+hour+
The latest Slashdot meme.
Good luck finding any cure for anything even remotly related to female anatomy. "Hi miss. I currently can't help you diagnose your symptoms right now, as I left my credit card at home and its required to validate that I am old enough to access my.....references...."
I had a long term and quite painful medical problem to do with the eustation tube in my ear being blocked. The doctors, and even the ENT specialist didn't really have much of a clue. We tried steroids (that helped a little), pinching the nose and blowing, decongestants and all sorts.
What Google did for me was to keep going back to doctors with "would xxxx work?". It got me prompting them. Eventually, I tried out some massage, which someone had recommended on groups (that Google found) as a way to relieve the tension. And met a massage therapist who applied some Bowen Technique which solved the problem (the jaw alignment was out after dental work).
I wouldn't use Google alone, but sometimes, doctors don't think of everything. Some of their suggestions were little more than "switch it off and on again".
"Google is only as good as it's knowledge base, and it's users, so this isn't a cure for everything."
It might not cure everything, but how does Google fare as a cure for the common cold?
I can think of two somewhat trivial reasons why this could be bad medicine:
Latent Hypochondriacs will type in some general symptoms and find that they have the dreaded newest and hippest malady. I foresee needless worrying and driven-up-the-wall family members.
If Google Bombs are still extant, what's to stop a special interest group from planting links to "cures" for wildly improbable scenarios?
"Caveat, surf-or" is never out of style, I s'pose...
"For the past 70 years, we used to be wrong only 20% of the time, but now we've discovered a new exciting method which allows us to be wrong 42% of the time!"
Frog blast the vent core.
Diagnosing using other people's reasoning...
isn't that against the point of a doctor having earned a medical degree.
Of course Google and any other search engine is an excellent tool for gathering valuable info. And its good as long the doc uses it for scientific facts and figures but its shady to be second -handing off other people's methods. The only way to get a Doctor that isn't prone to consider, for ex, chopping a 2 year old's tonsils out to prevent a tonsilitis that can never happen is to make sure the doc uses gathered knowledge to make independent medical decisions.
I have been telling people for a few years now that when the doctor leaves the room after examining you he is googling for a cure to what ails you.
Most people I told that to thought I was joking.
Let's play video games with mailmanZERO
according to my calculator its actually 32. which is, you know, according to my colleagues here at the oklahoma institute for the advancement of the mathematical sciences, 12 more than 20.
The article says that the researchers found the correct diagnosis amongst the top 3 found by google in 15 cases out of 26.
In other words, they took a very tiny sample, and then cherry-picked the good results from the bad ones. There's no mention of any serious statistical analysis (why pick 26 as a sample size? why pick 3 results instead of 4 or 5?). And there's no mention of any "control" experiment (e.g. guessing the answer, or perhaps looking it up in a medical textbook). This is a classic example of how to fit the facts to the desired conclusion.
While it does still happen that doctors can misdiagnose something even when presented with entirely factual data, misdiagnoses in such cases are typically _MUCH_ less frequent.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Zonk, this summary abuses apostrophes badly.
As Dave Barry said, "An apostrophe doesn't mean - Yikes! Look out! Here comes an S".
Tip: It's means "it is".
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I hope this doesn't get modded "Funny" 'cause I assure you it wasn't... I've got irritable bowel syndrome, and I'm a bit of a hypochondriac. OK, so not a "crazy thinking I'm ill ALL the time hypochondriac", but I'm very apprehensive. About a year or so ago I had some symptoms (which I won't describe here for obvious reasons...) and decided to Google for them. I spent about 1 week crying (yes, really crying) thinking I had Colon cancer, and about 1 year more to live or so. It took 3 doctors and all sorts of horrible tests (which I won't describe here either .... for obvious reasons...) for me to realize I was being silly and there wasn't anything wrong with me.
I can't imagine what my state of mind would've been if, prior to searching for the symptoms, I'd read this on slashdot... I woulds been even MORE sure that there was a 58% chance I had colon cancer and I might've killed myself...
So, if you're even a little apprehensive don't EVER google for your symptoms!
I can get a correct diagnosis in 100%. Sometimes.
While it is only wrong 42% of the time, which is about half of the time, it's impossible to know when it is right and when it is wrong. As such it is useless 100% of the time. Now a doctor being only wrong 20% of the time is much more useful, as you can assume they're right all the time, and you'll only be wrong 1 in 5 times, which for the mathematically retarded, is better then 1 in 2 times (or 1.16 in 2 times for the pedantic).
So is this all saying that incorrect diagnosis happened 20% of the time until the advent of Google, where it jumped to 42%?
...you hear typing in the next room as your doctor searches google for "cure for cancer sores"
Google is users?
Soylent green is people!
Google must have TRUE AI to do 8% better than a random coin flip!!! Those guys running Google are geniuses!
Thousands of the world's smartest PhDs, and they've beaten a flipping coin by a F*U*L*L 8 P*E*R*C*E*N*T!!!
Why, I'll get a google search is 5% better than reading bird entrails...!
The write-up is a bit funny and misleading.
It's saying of the 20% that's mis-diagnosed, Google correctly identified 58% of those.
However, what no one has brought up is that when something is misdiagnosed, no one knows until they do the autopsy, so you can't just do simple math to lower the error rate to 8%. As you suggest, while google does better when the doctor is wrong, Google is worse than the doctor when he's correct. I'm not sure it's even correct to assume that if the doctor used Google the diagnoses would be better or worse, since there is an element of human judgment in medical practice.
What is does suggest is that doctors and patients should consider using Google to do a check on their patients and themselves for diagnosis and treatment options.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
...that Google has now made Dr. House obsolite? Seriously, that dude is wrong way more than 54% of the time. Then you don't have to put up with the vicious, cutting sarcasm and depressing world view.
AC: Only on slashdot... could the sentence "My hovercraft is full of eels." be moderated "+4, Insightful
I think the words you're looking for instead of Wiki is "Expert System".
The FA gives the impression that they're talking about 58% of difficult illnesses, ie. some of the 20% they don't get right.
I kinda hoped doctors had a better shared resource for such things than Google.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
As a physician who specializes in difficult cases, maybe I can provide a slightly different perspective: What Google has done with Google Scholar has been to incorporate the PUBMED database (a database of all scholarly journals) as well as the database of OMIM (a database of inherited diseases) into its search protocol. Physicains (including myself) often will use the above two databases for aiding in the diagnosis of specific disease. You will also notice that the proper use of terminology helps (for example, the use of the term "nyctalopia" instead of the more common term "night-blindness") will help eliminate some common misconceptions. As the google search term is based on linkage, it may actually place the truly unusual diagnoses at the bottom of the list - To be fair to the public databases that have been instrumental in advancing American scientific progress (both the above databases are public domain as they are setup and run by the National Library of Medicine), the study cited above would be truly illustrative if it actually did a comparison between Google results and Pubmed results (www.pubmed.org).
I suppose querying Google for a medical diagnosis isn't much sillier of an idea than asking Slashdot for technical advice.
Reading around, talking to doctors and the ENT, I got the impression that eustation problems are a bit of a nightmare. That the area around the jaw, eustation, ear etc. are very tight, and inaccessible so diagnosis is extremely difficult.
I'm living in China, and the doctors here have a vested interest in selling me the most expensive drugs they have in stock. If it wasn't for me self-diagnosing with Google, I would have not only spent a ridiculous amount on medicine I don't really need. I would also been unaware that, at least on one occation, the medicine the doctors have convinced me to buy is highly recommended _not_ to be given to people with prior kidney-problems(like myself). I suppose if you live in a country with a decent medical system, using Google for these things is a bad plan, but for me it is the best medical advice I can get without going to Hong Kong.
Damn, my friend is dying, and I need to know how to give him aid!
"Welcome to MSN Search...here's the way to help someone with this-or-that:[cure]"
DAMN; my friend died!
MSN-S: was this information useful to you?
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.
It means 42% FAILURE!!!
What the heck? Would you trust anyone with those rates?
Your first error was assuming you would be able to correctly interpret the data you received.
Data knowledge, that's what doctors study all those years for.
Second error was not to talk to someone competent about your fears - worries grow if not confronted by reality. I could making jokes about tipping off customs the next time you fly on a plane (so you get it done for free on arrival), but cancer is a serious condition so I won't .
It is a good idea to clue yourself about what you have, it's a bad idea to Google for diagnostics if you're not competent to (a) ensure you have ALL relevant data and (b) interpret the results.
But I'm glad for you it wasn't cancer.
BTW, as I've been withholding bad humor it needs another outlet, so here it is.
Q: Why is a strong laxative the best anti-cough medicine?
A: You wouldn't DARE cough..
Aaaargh..
Insert
OMG!!! 1 hour after posting:
Score:3, Funny
You bunch of cruel ***t*rds.
Yes, They censor searches - IF you choose to use the censored Google from within China! Both the censored Google china and google.com in Chinese are still available within China. What's so wrong about having the choice to use a censored version of Google, but works much quicker because the Chinese Government's not trying to clumsily censor it? I'm against censorship, but providing choices in the matter is the best Google can do until the Chinese Government finally wakes up.
The medical information available online is basically what every medical student learns in the first year of medical school. This drug goes with that. This symptom points to that. The rest of medical scholl and the years of practice afterward are what make doctors into doctors. It has to do with seeing the symptoms hundreds of times in actual people and watching how the actual drugs affect hundreds of actual humans that makes a doctor a doctor.
If you know how to use coin flips to arrive at a correct diagnosis from arbitrary symptoms with a success rate of 50%, you should start getting ready for a trip to Stockholm.
sudo ergo sum
well, as you say it was modded funny, which is a tad strange, anywho;
What you did was right, and maybe it caused you a little worry but it was for the best. Say you had those symptoms and thought (like most people tend to) it'll jkust go away, I'm sure its nothing. Say it had been cancer. By the time you found out it could well have been too late.
Even though you went through a bad patch, if it had been cancer it would have saved your life
So you should use it to maybe consult on, but never assume that you're able to give a right diagnosis - but always go get stuff checked out!
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
If you have more trust in Google than your doctor, it's maybe time to change doctor!
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
This is a good thing. With Google at their fingertips, doctors can now have important information about rare diseases, like Count Choculitis:
You might have Count Choculitis
I've been using Google to help me diagnose my medical problems about every day for years now. The only problem that I've run into is that at the top of all my results these days, it says "Did you mean hypochondria?"
Almost two years testing my young girl for allergies (she had atopic dermatitis in her hands -- so much for atopic...). We found out she is allergic to cobalt or something, present e.g. in coins, some soaps, creams etc.
Doctors then prescribed corticoid creams which never worked (after more than one year usage). Corticoids, if you don't know, are a sort of hormone or alike, with _very_ dangerous effects on health and growth.
So we were getting a lot worried about the disease and the treatment alike.
I resorted to Google and found papers about this problem having increased over the years in England. Some researchers found it seemed to be associated with deficiency in omega-3 or omega-6 (something-linoleic acid).
Google again to find out where this could be obtained... evening primrose oil, which can be bought in capsules.
We were cautious in the beginning, but it is a kind of food anyway... after two weeks, her hands were clearly getting healed.
End of story, but another time medical science simply did not work. One wonders if "science" would be a correct designation for Medicine. 8-/
This idea, that people can list their symptoms and answer questions about how they feel, and receive a diagnosis from a database, is an idea whose time has come. It offers the opportunity, for the first time, for people to have access to knowledge that they need to understand what might be causing ill health, pain and suffering. This opportunity also allows for people to provide information back to the database that can be used to improve it.
It is too often the case that our search for information about alleviating our ill health, diseases, disorders and pain is limited by the amount of money that we have to give to doctors and hospitals. It is too often that the doctors themselves are wrong when diagnosing the causes of our symptoms. It is too often that doctors fail to learn from the mistakes they make when attempting to diagnose ill health and diseases.
It is time for people to be given a mechanism to empower them in the search for good health, a mechanism that does not depend upon how much money they have with which to purchase the opinions of doctors, one which can be improved as it is used.
In virtually every area of human knowledge we recognize that software and databases are used to do jobs that no single person could possibly be able to do, be expected to do, to do these jobs better than, faster than, and at far less cost than any single person could do them. It's time to accept that this is also true of assisting us in understanding the meaning of the symptoms of our ill health, ill nutrition, pain and suffering.
There should be no objection by anyone to the idea that it is anyone's basic right to such knowledge, and that the Internet is the ideal method of providing this.
was hoping Google could help identify a cure, or at least a treatment. So I entered "megalomania" and "politician". Informative, to be sure, but the only effective treatment seems to involve shooting them until they are dead.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Specialist put her on a drug that caused her ever increasing grand mal seizures. He kept uping the dosage despite seizures being a contra-indication. She started with occassional seizures and progressed to a couple a day. She'd had previously had brain surgery to remove an araknoid cyst some time before and was experiencing petite mal (blank staring) seizures and narcolepsy. (I now suspect that carbonmonoxide poisoning due to a faulty car exhaust was partly to blame and not the brain injury, nor subsequent treatment but the truth is I won't know). Anyway the drug was also killing her personality and making her moody and erratic. Unfortunately coming off the drug immediately leaves patients prone to being suicidal so we had to bring her down over a period of weeks.
Did the doctor work out what was going on? No the arrogant son of a bitch didn't bother to give the fact that his patient had developed seizures a second thought. Fucker wanted her to stay on the medication. I had googled it, and after we pointed out to him that it was a contraindication and asked to have her come off it for a while, he said okay. Again I'm the one who looked up the fact that suddenly stopping would have made her suicidal.
Three things were re-enforced for me:
1) Yes Google is only as good as the researcher. Using Google to find a specialist site is probably one of the better ways to go. Thing is you have to learn some of the lingo and understand what you're seeing. Takes a bit of plugging away to do that.
2) The medical profession is full of arrogant tossers. The only less practical, more corrupt systems I know of are our legal and political systems. Some doctors are good despite the system. However the system encourages self serving educated idiots who take no interest in themselves (not to mention overworked perpetually tired doctors making life and death decisions). Most doctors don't take kindly to being second guessed, think they know best even when they haven't considered something properly, and think themselves above using technology to diagnose a patient. In the 21st Century the medical profession remains very 16th Century.
3) Get a good doctor and they make you better. Get a bad one and they'll take a minor problem you have and kill you with their incorrect treatment. It is entirely possible to know better than your doctor. In that case you still do need someone medically trained. Get a second or third opinion. Your life can depend on it.
She was deteriorating so quickly that I have no doubt whatsoever that had I not worked out what was wrong with my fiancee she'd have been dead within about 6 months from the time I did work it out (if not sooner). Having a search engine there to be able to research her condition was literally a life saver. Google happened to be king of the hill at the time.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
This happened Feb, 2003.
2 months after finishing college and starting a new job in a new area, I woke up one morning with an odd stomach pain. I didn't think anything of it, so I went to work. By lunch time, the pain did not relax at all. It didn't get worse... just a steady piercing pain. I told a co-worker I was taking a half day. By 5pm, I was starting to get really worried because this was not a normal feeling stomach pain, and it was still there.
I went to Google and typed in stomach pain, and that's when I was starting to really get worried. Several websites started directing me to Appendicitis. After reading more, I had all the Appendicitis symptoms except "nauseated". I called a friend, and he said, "Nah, man! It's probably just something you ate! You said you aren't feeling nauseated, right? I'd wait until you were nauseated."
I had crappy insurance. I didn't want to go to the hospital unless I needed to, but since everything I read online was pointing to Appendicitis, I eventually decided that peace of mind was worth an out-of-pocket exam, so I jumped in the car and drove myself to the ER.
I went to the front desk, and he asked, "What do you think is wrong?"
I said, "I think I have Appendicitis."
"All right, fill this out and sit over there."
When I got to finally see a nurse, I said, "I think I have Appendicitis."
"Does this hurt?" "Yes."
When I got to finally a doctor, I said, "I think I have Appendicitis."
"We'll run some tests."
They ran a blood test. Came back positive.
They ran some x-ray type test. Came back positive.
By 10pm, the doctor came and said, "You have Appendicitis." By 5am, they were operating on me.
After one flaming bag of pus removed, and ~$5,000 worth of medical debt, I spent the next week on disability leave playing Final Fantasy X in my apartment. Good game, btw.
Second, I would assume they always inputted the right symptoms and signs. But how many patients really display all the "right" signs and don't have some symptoms that are misleading. One of the hard problems in emergency medicine, since you don't have a case history, is knowing what symtoms are caused by the disease or injury. Is the patient's pulse fast or is it normally fast. Is the patient's blood pressure low or is it normallly low. Are they beligerent normally or might they have a concussion?
toss in some red herring symptoms and I'd bet these diagnoses become so promiscuous they are uselessly non-specific.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The double-edged "sword".
Scott Adams was able to outdiagnose his doctors using Google.
--
RumorsDaily
Are you telling me that Google isn't the cure for everything? How... How could you?
.. and two weeks later, you'll have lawsuits from people outraged that the proposed cure for athlete's foot is smashing your nuts with a sledgehammer. It's not that surprising that people are going to the Internet for medical advice, although it's mildly worrying. One forum I visit has nothing to do with medical matters yet people regularly post questions asking 'HAY I AM BLEEDING FROM THE EARS ANYONE KNOW WHATS UP' to which the response is generally 'Go and see a doctor, you pillock.'
Google will perform well in this function ONLY as yet another tool in the hands of a properly trained doctor. That being said, I was able to enter a series of seemingly unrelated symptoms and it came to a correct conclusion. And having spent years wondering just WTF was wrong with me (ya, ya, besides the obvious), this can be a serious aid for the patient... or the hypochondriac.
Hmm... so this is the answer... Percentage of misdiagnoses by Deep Though's father.
Just last Tuesday I was feeling like a miserable failure, so I asked Google what the problem could be. I got the right answer in just one click.
There is a site close to that, http://cancerfoc.us/. It's a google search but it's results are prioritized by cancer researchers...
So how long before there is a www.20Q.net style site/game for medical diagnosis? (Put one in your first-aid kit.)
Or eventually, self service healthcare booths: swipe your credit and insurance card, put in the symptoms, sit in the booth, let it take some medical imaging, prick your finger, etc.... then get prescriptions written, or be referred to a hospital or surgeon. (Or maybe even open up a teleconference with an actual doctor or specialist.)
New studies have found that research helps doctors identify diseases they are not familiar with!
while at work one day back in 1997 i got these weird blisters on my face. they got worse quite quickly. a fever came. sweats. sitting in my cube i started panicking and typed a search string containing my various symptoms into the search engine of the day at that time, prolly hotbot (!)
...
the search engine told me that at best i had herpes but more likely leprosy.
my doctor finally returned my call, had me come over, and told me it was chickenpox...
can you imagine what a hypochondriac's google search logs might looks like?
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
I read an article about eight years ago about an expert system written in Prolog that allowed doctors to select a list of symptoms, it would then ask about additional symptoms and then return a list of likely conditions. It apparently had a very high degree of accuracy (I think it was in the low 90's), and was vehemently rejected by the majority of doctors.
Hopefully the next generation of doctors will be so use to using internet search engines, that they won't feel threatened by a tool designed to help them diagnose a patient, not to replace doctors.
What next? I can lose money quicker on the stock market using Google?
you had me at #!
Oh, good. And here I was afraid that I'd have to finish medical school and residency to be a good doctor. Fortunately, my Google skills are top-notch, so I guess I'll just run outside and hang up my shingle right away!
P.P.S. I'm doing Science and I'm still alive.
in many senses google is an expert system. it contains a huge amount of information. often though patients lookup information in google and then develop the disease. doctors have to fight through this also, so it's hardly surprising that they try and find what it is that the patient has developed.
Why UNIX?
But not for this purpose. It's a good resource for handouts explaining diseases in layman's terms. It's also good for diagrams to show patients. And occasionally I'll fire it up if I don't recognize a trade name for a new medication.
But for diagnosis, no. Here are the limitations of this study as I see them. The New England Journal cases are weird, uncommon diseases. They often feature a constellation of uncommon symptoms, such as the example used in the article - IPEX (immunodeficiency, polyendocrinopathy, enteropathy, X linked). If you search for just immunodeficiency and polyendocrinopathy, you will get the answer. This is because those are rare symptoms and their combination is even rarer. You would get the same result on any of the well-traveled medical professional sites. If you had a patient with more common symptoms such as with fatigue, weight loss, and night sweats, the prospects of a successful search are low. Another problem with the study is that diagnosis requires a determination of which symptoms are important. If you search for "immunodeficiency polyendocrinopathy hangnail" you don't get IPEX. The researchers in the study got to choose which features of the disease to include and made sure to search for them in medical language. If they had searched for "immunodeficiency low thyroid" they would get an article about greyhounds. It's the same symptom, but not searched medically (polyendocrinopathy). A final issue is that one of the reason these cases are so hard (they all come from Massachusetts General Hospital, where I've cared for a few of them) is that they take awhile to unfold. Usually by the time they are written up nicely, they are far easier than when only one or two symptoms have developed or when the bloodwork is only half finished. When a case appears in the New England Journal, you start thinking rare things immediately. When it appears in your clinic, you should think of common things first.
Anyway, I definitely think that google (or more likely other diagnostic algorithms) has a role in the future of diagnosis. I don't think that it is anywhere near that point yet. I think the study actually supports that (58% is pretty poor!)
Simply plugging in symptoms will rarely get you a definitive diagnosis. Symptoms always have to be taken into context around things like personal medical history, physical exam, and the doctor thinking to ask about questions you might not think relevant. Say one day you have chest pain and trouble breathing. That could be anything from a heart attack, to a pulmonary embolus, to a pneumothorax, a fractured rib, or many other things. Medicine is a tapestry, you can't look at just 1 or 2 strands and expect to see the entire picture. As for getting information, information has never been restricted. Nobody is trying to restrict you from buying a medical textbook. You're able to visit libraries and do your own research. We'd all like information to be freely availably at no cost to us, but there are limitations to being able to get things for free.
a) Why on earth would you use Google when you can go directly to PubMed, which is where most of the halfway decent Google results would be anyway?
b) This is not, in general, a great application of search technology. Simple AI is what's needed here. Doctors used to do an extremely poor job of identifying which person in the ER with chest pains was actually having a heart attack. A doctor made a database of cases and symptoms, and then made a simple flowchart that could do a better job of identifying heart attack than some of the most experienced doctors in the country. We need a little more of that.
If you really want to be an amateur physician for a difficult case, spend your time in PubMed, not in Google. Most (but not all!) of the utter crap and cranks are kept out of PubMed, while there is still room for non-conventional wisdom.
Rather than looking for what you do have... searches are really good for finding out what you don't have. Looking at your symptoms you can easily strike out many many illnesses and narrow the list down to just a few potential causes. These few are the ones you go to your doctor with and say, hey here are my symptoms, here are the possible causes I've found... can we test for these?
Your MMV but a good doctor would say "sure but see this one and this one... these are very unlikely based on my experience and expensive to test for and NOT life threatening, but this one here is unlikely, expensive and life threatening so we SHOULD test for it... and the rest we'll test for just to get them off the list. Now let's do a full exam to be sure that your list of symptoms is accurate from a medical standpoint and that you haven't missed any that we might be able to find from blood tests and whatnot."
A bad doctor will say "hmm thanks but I think I can find out the problem and I'm the one with a medical degree, so just let me take care of this" while not looking at your list or even acknowledging it.
The same test can be done with any professional actually... your mechanic, your plumber, etc. In fact if you have some info about the problem and demonstrate your knowledge you should get much better service from a good pro. A bad pro will take offense and be more likely to put you off and give you bad service... which you wouldn't have a clue about until after the job if you don't first 'interview' them with your list of problems/solutions.
Going to a pro completely uninformed is most likely to get you shuffled through the system as they know you don't have a clue and unless there is going to be serious repercussions to them providing poor service... they can easily do a sloppy job for the same payment and pass the buck to the next professional you call to actually fix the problem.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Doctor: Hang on. (types, waits, wrinkles his brow) Um, don't do that.
My script don't crash! She crashes, you crashed her!
These lesions usually spontaneously resolve, or can be treated with bisphosphonates (osteoporosis meds) and a bone stimulator. Surgical drilling has not been shown to affect the outcome. The fact that your friends knees became better probably had nothing to do with the surgery. Knee replacements are indicated when the osteonecrosis leads to collapse of the knee joint, usually in large lesions. Since your friend is young, a total knee replacement would not be the preferred treatment - an osteotomy (cutting the bone to change the knee alignment and weight bearing area) would be the preferred treatment.
-Francis C. MD
Dept. Musculoskeletal Oncology, Orthopaedic Surgery.
..........FULL STOP.
Check out this from El Reg...there's some fishy numbers flying around and some toying with the evidence: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/10/google_med ical_survey
From the Reg article:
On closer examination, however, we discover doctors Hangwi Tang and Jennifer Hwee Kwoon Ng used just 26 case studies. And it gets worse, the closer you look. Google only found the correct diagnosis 58 per cent of the time.
The "researchers" were also remarkably generous with their definition of a correct diagnosis. If one of the top three results returned by Google was correct, it was considered a success.
So Google was returning false diagnosis up to 80 per cent of the time. You might as well throw darts at a spinning dartboard, tied to the back of a drunken horse.
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, and not zebras. Of course, that is for American and Canadian MDs.
So as a result of that saying, odd and very rare diseases are often referred to as "Zebras"
..........FULL STOP.
In some cases where diagnosis is tricky, google might help a lot... Don't you remember patrick volkerding??
r ent/PAT-NEEDS-YOUR-HELP.txt
http://ftp.ist.utl.pt/pub/slackware/slackware-cur
In Soviet China google is diagnosed as a disease.
However, sites like WebMD are horrible for patients with less knowledge. I always get people coming in, thinking they have horrible diseases like Lupus or Scleroderma because they types in "rash," "female" and "headache."
And patients often (very understandably) do not understand side effects of medications. They may refuse a drug that they definately need, because they typed it into google, and see a list of half a dozen side effects. These sites rarely explain that it is 1 in 100,000 that get these, or perhaps it is a single-reported case of side effect X, but they will fear that giving this anti-depressant to their daughter (for example) will make her commit suicide. Being informed of the risks is definately a good thing. They won't take the meds, they'll come back 3 months later and take it, and they get cured without a problem (and w/o side effects that weren't gonna happen anyway). Not getting the whole story makes life a lot harder for the patient. And I've seen it so much.
Sure you can google and occasionally you will win the medical lottery, but remember specialist MDs usually have trained for 12 years before being fully qualified.
I have a friend in plastics sitting his finals soon, and all he does is study. He knew 4 residents in another state sit their finals recently and they all failed, showing the standards are pretty damn high.
A little bit og knowledge can be a dangerous thing.
Would you like you googling about c++ and fixing a strange network card driver problem on your production servers???
46137
I do a lot of computer technical support and one thing that I have found Google to be extremely useful for is spyware lookup. All I do is type the name of the process in and 90% of the time, the first or second link will tell me (right on the Google summary; without even clicking) if it is malware or not.
After reading an article in the recent Wired about the 2.5% of the population that can't reconize faces, I googled my seemingly unique symptoms and quickly found the support website along with a downloadable copy of the book perfectly describing my problem. As I have never been properly diagnosed nor treated my whole life, this discovery 8 days ago is changing my life.
./ers, is love shyness - noted by a remarkable inability to get women. See love-shy.com .
BTW my affliction which apparently affects 1.5% of heterosexual males, and probably a much greater percentage of
"Just Google it."
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
I had a rare debilitating disease show up about four years ago. No insurance at the time. I spent over two years going from one doctor to the next, and none of them could come up with an answer. I was sleeping 14-16 hours/day, had a huge list of nasty symptoms and all they could come up with was 'you must be depressed, take these pills'. Truth was, up until I got sick my life was better than ever and the only thing that could be depressing me was my health and the mounting debt resulting from all my medical expenses. Nothing my doctors prescribed worked and I was only getting worse - everything was slowly shutting down.
I finally decided to do some research on my own (PubMed and Google). Three months into it I found what I thought was the answer. I presented my findings to my doctor, backed with the research I had discovered. Big mistake to make on someone with a huge ego. So I tried another doctor and brought along my findings and a daily log that I had kept with all my symptoms. Once again this was a mistake - she couldn't take credit for the 'discovery' so she would have nothing of it. I went to a specialist who was widely known as the best in my state, but his ego also got in the way. It was finally the fourth doctor who decided to look into it and let me take some blood tests. When the blood tests came back it turned out I was right. He said that just two or three months more of going down the path I was headed without treatment would have marked the end of my life (at age 24). He (we) treated the problem and, though I will never be 100% again, I am able to live a pretty normal life now.
The medical system in the US needs a major shake-down. Doctors need to realize that they are equals, like they are in Sweden where people call them by their first names. I now call my doctors by their first name and if a doctor can't take it, I know I'm at the wrong place. Kick-backs from pharmaceutical companies need to stop, and pharmaceutical companies should not be funding the schools where the doctors go to learn their field because they're being brainwashed there (I'm saying all of this as the owner of a small pharma company - the whole system is incredibly corrupt). And compensation shouldn't be based on how much you can squeeze out of a patient, as this only promotes malpractice. Kickbacks from referrals - especially to specialists - should be illegal where it isn't already. The law in some states (including my own) requires a doctor to order any form of blood or urine test. This drums up business nicely for them - they get to charge for a visit to order the blood test, sometimes a fee to 'review the blood test' (which is trivial), and then another visit to go over the results. I can't tell you the number of times I ended up paying over $400 because of the doctors fees for a test that the lab charged under $30 to administer. Blood and urine tests should be available to anyone who wants to take them (especially if they're willing to pay for them on their own) without the need for visiting a doctor. Any idiot can read them and if there is a problem you can see the doctor if necessary.
Be sure you have a doctor who is willing to treat you as an equal and that your doctor actually listens to your concerns. If your doctor stands on a high pedestal, do everyone a favor - bluntly knock him/her off and then go somewhere else. If you have a medical problem, do the research and be your own advocate. Don't ever feel uncomfortable questioning or double-guessing your doctor - it's your life and well-being on the line, not theirs.
The story says that Google indexes 3 billion medical articles. Does that sound high to anyone else?
I worked for eight months on a project last year here in the UK being sold to the National Heath Service called "The Map of Medicine." This is a "knowledge support" system which is basically a very sophisticated (and extremely large) set of tree diagrams (or "pathways") that assist a clinician in their diagnosis and treatment of patients.
We conducted user research as part of the design of this system, and one of the things we found was that younger clinicians (doctors, consultants and students) use Google. Some even use Google when they are with patients.
Whether this is a good or a bad thing is hard to say, but it did affect our design decisions.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Actually it's not recognized as a disease at all, as the people who have it can't agree on the symptoms. They claim to have fibres and sometimes small living creatures coming from lesions on their skin. Sometimes the living creatures are able to shape-shift into demons. I'm not making this up.
They constantly pick at their skin lesions to pull out the fibers, and then surprisingly, the lesions never heal.
A lot of the sufferers turn out to be hypochondriacs, OCD sufferers, meth addicts, or generally insane.
As a republican I feel it my responsibity to manufacture criminals. People need punished!
I just tried to use this method to diagnose myself, and all I got was this.
In that case, why not spinoff a reated venture called One Laptop Per Doctor? It isn't of much use to doctors int he third world unless they have a computer and net access.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
As I watch family members make _well_ over 6 figures by being in the medical profession while relying on technology from scientists and engineers that make a fraction of what the MDs make I'm left to wonder when the scales will shift.
I heard a guest lecture by an EE that was describing using nanotech to measure blah-blah-blah genetics and microorganisms to quickly identify what is wrong with a human. So there I was wondering who would be more likely to make a mistake, an MD that would be required to memorize all of their information or some computer chip connected to a database. MDs are taught to look at humans and our ailments in terms of statistics - if your symptoms are A, B, & C then it is most likely that you have D. The guest lecturer then commented on how most of these MDs couldn't even figure out the statistics that guide their practice (not sure if it was true but it was humorous).
I was left wondering - why do we need MDs to do statistics and database lookups when a computer would be better suited for the job. A person walks around with a thumbdrive that has their prescriptions on it, their allergies, etc combined with a chip that checks a person's condition and out comes, what I have to believe, a more accurate assessment of what ails the person - so why the MD? Think about this, in just about every single other aspect of life technology is driving costs downward rapidly - but not Medicine - those costs continue to increase - WHY?!
Surgeries and such are another issue but for figuring out what is wrong with a person, I can't see how they are deserving of what they get paid considering the guy who comes up with the inventions that make their lives easier doesn't get near that amount of salary. Something is messed up with medicine in the US and change can't come fast enough.
personal note:
Every time that I've visited an MD with an ailment in the past 10 yrs - and I don't go often, maybe once every couple years - they've gotten it wrong. If I would have listened to them I would have had several more unnecessary surgeries instead just the 1 unnecessary knee surgery that I did have. It seems that I'm better suited at diagnosing my own problems than they are and in every case my observations were disregarded and I was expected to bow to the alter of MD-ism.
While a good sources of pretty much everything on the net, Google just isn't the one key thing. There are many things unavailaible on the net, much of this in the biological field and in new founds as well as in many other fields... and really, not everything on the net can be found to be accurate. Even if Google IS of great help, it's a good thing to doublecheck with litterature.
Am I mad, or is it just that knife in my hand?
yeah, because things that are 'unproven' don't work. right?
Osteopathy fixed my creaky TMJ (jaw joint) when nothing else did (not even Bowen). Osteopathic Manipulation's usefulness has been proven to the people who use it day-in and day-out, and to the patients who experience the 'magic'. In Spontaneous Healing Andrew Weil, M.D., told how he couldn't get his fellow medikal doktors to watch Dr. Fulford work on people with all sorts of health problems. Chronic ear infections and behavioral problems in children would typically disappear after one or three visits.
No, doktors are trained to prescribe drugs which typically don't work. Osteopathy represents a threat to the medical status quo, though progressive doctors refer their patients to competent practitioners whenever they think it might be warranted.
My "stepbrother" has had behavioral problems for quite some time. He'd had his tonsils chopped out when he was younger and spent several months sleeping on a "slant board" so he wouldn't asphyxiate, which indicated to me that he desperately needed proper attention. I'd told his mother he needed osteopathic-style manipulation, but she just ignored me. Finally I set him up with a guy I'd had some experience with. After a few visits his daily headaches had mostly become memories - 17 years worth. The Cranial Osteopathic Manipulation/craniosacral therapy process is one of removing layers of trauma stored in the body - sometimes a single visit is all that's necessary, sometimes a specific body needs more work. Every case is unique, and gets treated accordingly.
As for "non-pseudoscientific medicine", consider:
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
It's what happened here, IIRC.
After I talked to my dad on the phone one night, I googled the symptoms he had described to me that he was having. Congestive heart failure kept popping up as a result, so I called him back and made him go to the hospital. Sure enough, he was having congestive heart failure, and the doc was surprised he hadn't had a heart attack yet. He had to have a quintuple bypass and was in the hospital for weeks, but he probably wouldn't have gone in if I hadn't told him what I found online.
About 25 years ago I was chatting to a young programmer, I think about Prolog, which was very hot at the time. He said he was working on a medical diagnosis system, and he was upset because the error rate was quite high, perhaps 25%.
I pointed out to him that doctors have an error rate too, and he should be comparing his system's error rate to theirs. He seemed unconsoled; thinking about it now, I can see that he would have had to pitch that concept to a bunch of *doctors*.
Another point that I might have made was that his system's error rate was being calculated on the assumption that the comparison diagnosis made by a doctor was actually correct itself.
Yet another point is that a doctor's success/error rate may be skewed by the fact that some diseases are much more common than others. For instance, if 80% of his patients have disease A, he can just guess that they *all* have A, and achieve an 80% success rate. In other words, if they are required to diagnose 1000 separate diseases, rather than a representative mix of 1000 patients, their true success rate may be absolutely appalling.
There does not exist a methodology by which doctors can record a patient's symptoms, register the diagnosis, determine the eventual accuracy of the diagnosis and record the outcome of the process of diagnosis and the success of the treatment. It's my opinion that in this era of computers and application-specific graphic interfaces that there is no excuse for such a methodology does not exist. If it were to exist, and it soon MUST come to exist, then I am very much in support of the idea that patients should have access to the reports that could summarize the events in a system containing this methodology, and that they should even have the ability to enter information into it.
Doctors are very often wrong and are in a very poor position to note whether they are wrong or not. When doctors do not learn from their mistakes they become less able to serve their patients. Public databases which can help us all understand the meaning of our symptoms are very much necessary. It always has often been and often always will be a matter of life and death whether any patients symptoms can be correctly understood and whether the diagnosis drawn from the symptoms is correct or not, as well as whether the treatment applied is successful or not.
It's time to introduce expert systems into the situation, to allow everyone to contribute to it what they know from their own experience and to allow everyone to be given the answers that the system can logically provide from the expert knowledge which the system contains. Such a system and methodology can be designed to improve itself with use and can eventually provide anyone with both better information about illness and better information about how illness should be treated.
Time pressured clinicians overwhelmed with the exponential increase in bio-medical knowledge are desperately seeking clinical diagnosis decision support systems (CDDSS). Google, whilst extremely helpful in shifting the 'search paradigm', is of limited usefulness as a CDDSS. Google's accuracy of 58%, reported by Tang and Ng in the British Medical Journal, 10th November 2006, is less than that achieved by older generation rules based CDDSS and will not engender widespread adoption. Isabel (www.isabelhealthcare.com) is a web-based, point-of-care CDDSS designed used by healthcare professionals and has been extensively validated in clinical studies in terms of ease of use, accuracy and impact as a diagnosis reminder system. Isabel has been shown in published studies to be accurate in over 90 % of cases and to cause frontline physicians to consider an important diagnosis they should have considered in 1 in 8 cases. Isabel uses natural language processing algorithms (www.autonomy.com) that searches by context and meaning a database of medical textbooks and journals - to understand' rather than just 'find'. Isabel suggests diagnoses rather than documents and these diagnoses are filtered using the patient's age, gender, pregnancy state and geographical-region prevalence heuristics. An independent study submitted for publication looked at Isabel's performance on the same set of cases using whole text data entry [entire case presentation cut and pasted verbatim] and entry of extracted clinical features. Isabel came up with the final diagnosis in 74% and 96% respectively. The aim of CDDSS is not to replace but to quickly and easily give the 'learned intermediary' (clinician) a differential diagnosis to consider. Sophisticated and validated CDDSS are now able to rapidly assist diagnosticians and make the cognitive process of diagnosis more accurate and consistently reliable.
Looks like we will see more fierce battle in this arena