Web Medical Diagnosis

Can Google be used to aid in the diagnosis of medical symptoms by patients and their healthcare professionals?

Are you interested in the use of online search engines, like Google, for medical symptom diagnosis by both the public and healthcare professionals?  Well you have come to the right place to learn about this relatively new use of online search engines/databases and join the emotional discussions and debate.

Stay tuned to www.WebMedicalDiagnosis.com as this revolutionary approach to medical diagnosis evolves along with online search engines and databases.

On November 10th 2006 the British Medical Journal published an article on research involving the use of Google to assist physicians in medical diagnosis.  The research was conducted by researchers in Brisbane Austrailia.  They used 26 diagnostic problems published in the New England Journal of Medicine as the basis for their research work.  While this is a small sample for research purposes, and the results were far from perfect, and the amount of personal judgement used by the physicians involved was significant, this research does show just how far online search engines have come and also how far they have to go.

Subscription services like Isabel stand in stark contrast to the early efforts of Google and other online search engines to be used as tools by healthcare professionals for medical diagnosis.  Especially very experienced physicians working in state of the art facilities.  However, when it comes to health care professionals like nurses, physician assistants, nurse practioneers, etc., worldwide it definitely remains to be seen whether the subscription services will actually be more widely used than “free” search engines.