"Doctor Google" - Search engines as diagnostic tools.
A paper in Archives of Disease in Childhood demonstrates the power of internet search engines as diagnostic tools.
The paper by Bouwman et al. describes two children with lysosomal storage disorders. In both cases the diagnosis was made by the parents before medical professionals. The parents used the children's symptoms and signs as search terms and made the correct diagnosis after viewing the pages suggested by the search engine.
Clinical diagnosis is in many ways a process of pattern recognition and the power of internet search engines to "recognize" such patterns in search terms should not be underestimated. Their are increasing numbers of papers showing that search engines can be considered useful diagnostic tools for both physicians and non-physicians, especially for rare diseases.
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