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."

Good luck

[Shados]

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...."

Another great medical breakthrough!

[Sippan]

"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!"

Re:I always knew I was right!

[Foole]

Did he ever give you a prescription for 'more cowbell'?

hypochondria

[natrius]

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?"

It's true

[Minwee]

Just last Tuesday I was feeling like a miserable failure [google.com], so I asked Google what the problem could be. I got the right answer in just one click.

self diagnosis = fun!

[yulek]

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?