How to Google Your Diagnosis
If you have a computer and a symptom, chances are you've turned to Dr. Google to help you figure out your diagnosis. But how do you know when you're getting reliable information? We asked Lisa Sanders, M.D., author of Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis, for her advice on taking your diagnosis into your own hands.
Q: How good is Google at making a diagnosis?
A: Not as good as you might hope. Two doctors in Australia fed Google the key symptoms for tough diagnostic cases taken from the pages of the New England Journal of Medicine. Google came up with a correct diagnosis barely half the time. On the other hand, most of the time symptoms are caused by common diseases and so the internet, and Google in particular, may be useful in helping many of us get a better grip on the possible causes of those symptoms.
Q: So can we trust the information we get online?
A: Increasingly, yes. Earlier this year, a study published in the journal Cancer looked at 343 Web pages about breast cancer found through online searches. Study researchers found 41 inaccuracies on 18 of the 343 sites -- giving the information search an error rate of 5.2 percent. That's not bad really. Plus, Google gives priority to sites that have been vetted by respected medical organizations such as the National Medical Library.
Q: Getting a simple answer out of Google can be a challenge. You say that a search for "headache" results in 26 million hits. What are some steps a person can take to get a more accurate online diagnosis?
A: There are a few things you can do to help you get a little closer to the right diagnosis.
1. Be as specific as possible. Don't just put in headache unless you are prepared to look through hundreds of sites. What are the unusual aspects of your headache? For example, is it a throbbing headache on one side of your head? Search unilateral throbbing headache. Highlighting one or two of the characteristic of your symptom can make your search easier.
2. If you can't limit your search by making it more specific then add the name of a source you trust to the search. You can search "diarrhea Mayo" and get the Mayo clinic take on diarrhea. Other reliable sources include NIH (National Library of Medicine), Medline, Healthline, WebMD and of course, YourTotalHealth . These sources are like giant encyclopedias of medical information and provide good basic information on many symptoms and lists possible causes.
3. Use the appropriate medical terms when you can. But you have to be careful not to give yourself a diagnosis that will then become a self fulfilling prophecy. For example, if you have a cough and search bronchitis, you will miss other types of cough that might fit what you actually have better. I think this works best when your doctor has already given you a name for your symptom.
4. Use a search engine designed to pull up reliable health information, such as http://www.hon.ch/. HON stands for Health On the Net and is a non-commercial site accredited by the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. All of the sites shown have been vetted by the Health on the NetFoundation.
Lisa Sanders, M.D., is the author of Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis, published by Broadway Books.
