Interesting!
Doctors
use Google to diagnose disease: study
It is not just patients who are frantically plugging
their symptoms into Google to see what disease they might have, Australian
researchers say doctors are doing it too. Dr Hangwi Tang and Dr Jennifer Ng of the Dr Tang says the study was driven by personal
curiosity after noticing how patients and doctors alike were using Google to
diagnose difficult cases. 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. They say an online search is likely to be more
effective at helping to diagnose conditions with unique symptoms that can be
used as search terms. Dr Tang says part of the challenge in using Google is
to be able to efficiently sift through the many pages of links that you get
from an online search. He thinks that doctors are better placed than patients
at doing this because they are better at selecting relevant links. "I don't think Google can replace doctors, in
other words," said Dr Tang. Millions
of facts
Doctors have been estimated to carry 2 million facts
in their heads to help them to diagnose disease, the researchers say. But search engines allow them to get quick access to
an ever increasing medical knowledge base that might be impossible to hold in
their head. Google in particular gives access to more than 3
billion articles, they say, with Google Scholar restricting searches to peer
reviewed articles. Dr Tang says while there are a number of other search
engines that clinicians can use, they often prefer Google because it is so easy
to use and freely available. Other
studies
Professor Johanna Westbrook of the Centre for Health
Informatics in Her team looked at how specialised search engines
could help clinicians to both diagnose and treat patients, using the best
available evidence. The study found clinicians were 21 per cent more
likely to give the correct answers when they used online search engines. Interestingly though, a few clinicians got the wrong
answers using the search engines, although they got the right answers without
them. Professor Westbrook says this underscores the
importance of learning how to interpret complex evidence. Another interesting finding was that clinical nurse
consultants using the search engines were just as accurate as doctors. Professor Westbrook says this suggests search engines
might help such nurses to diagnose and treat patients in rural areas where
there are fewer doctors. "[An online search engine is] available 24 hours
a day," she said. "Whereas you can't get a clinician 24 hours a
day. You can't get to a hospital library 24 hours a day." Professor Westbrook says that while Google might be
good for helping find information about diseases with unique symptoms, more
sophisticated search engines would be required for more complex diseases. Best Regards, Kelly Zantey Creator, BellyBelly.com.au Conception, Pregnancy,
Birth and Baby |
