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Google Used To Diagnose Disease

Posted by Zonk on from the jack-was-using-google-on-wednesday dept.

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."

3 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. Good luck by Shados · · Score: 4, Funny

    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...."

  2. Another great medical breakthrough! by Sippan · · Score: 3, Funny

    "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!"

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    Frog blast the vent core.
  3. self diagnosis = fun! by yulek · · Score: 3, Funny

    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?

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    in this age of communication i'm just not getting through