A team of Australian doctors Googled the symptoms of 26 cases for a study in the New England Journal of Medicine. In 15 cases, the web search came up with the right diagnosis, the paper published on the British Medical Journal website reports.
The authors say Google can be a "useful aid", but UK experts said the internet was "no replacement" for doctors....
[W]hile doctors carry a huge amount of medical information in their heads, they may need to seek further help if they come up against an unusual case.
In each of the 26 cases studied, researchers based at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane selected three to five search terms from each case and did a Google search without knowing the correct diagnoses. They then recorded the three diagnoses that were ranked most prominently and selected the one which seemed most relevant to the signs. The doctors then compared the results with the correct diagnoses as published in the journal. Google searches found the correct diagnosis in just over half of the cases....
But they said a successful search needed a "human expert" user, and therefore patients would have less success trying to diagnose themselves on the internet....
"Useful information on even the rarest medical syndromes can now be found and digested within a matter of minutes. Our study suggests that in difficult diagnostic cases, it is often useful to google for a diagnosis." ...
Comment. Jan Velterop sent me this story with the comment that it could be seen as an argument for OA. He's right. Of course Google won't replace doctors and will help expert users more than inexpert users (qualifications clearly laid out in the BMJ article and this BBC summary). But it's just as clear that removing access barriers to research literature will help practicing physicians in their practice. This study was done with Google, which covers a good deal of research literature and a good deal of crap. Imagine cutting the crap and doing the same study on PubMed Central. Imagine doing the same study in the hypothetical future when 100% of the peer-reviewed medical research literature is OA and we can build search engines to cover all and only that literature.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/10/2006 11:25:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
