Doctors in doubt about a patient's ailment could use Google to help them reach a diagnosis, researchers said today.
Two Australian doctors have found that entering the symptoms of a tricky case into the internet search engine often results in accurately diagnosing the illness.
They put Google to the test by entering the symptoms of 26 difficult cases recorded in the New England Journal of Medicine into the search engine to see how accurate an aid to diagnosis it was. And in 58% of cases using the search engine led to the correct diagnosis.
