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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
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
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
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".
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.
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.
Did he ever give you a prescription for 'more cowbell'?
This is not a turnip.
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!
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
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'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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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.