BMJ  2006;333 (2 December), doi:10.1136/bmj.39050.451759.3A

Editor's Choice

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Everyone uses Google, including doctors and patients. Should we rely on it to help make diagnoses? Hangwi Tang and Jennifer Ng evaluated (doi: 10.1136/bmj.39003.640567.AE) Google's diagnostic skills with 26 recent case studies from the New England Journal of Medicine. They found that in 15 of the cases they were able to find the ultimate diagnosis by Googling major search terms from the case record. While this doesn't prove anything, and it certainly depends on the knowledge and skills of the Googlers, it does confirm that there is a lot of relevant information out there on the web. In a related editorial (doi: 10.1136/bmj.39044.369745.BE), Martin Gardner points out that all that Google is doing is searching—very quickly and widely—for medical terms and returning results that have a high number of matches, regardless of whether the term is a diagnosis, treatment, anatomic part, or anything else. Only with a . . . [Full text of this article]

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