Everyone likes a quick medical diagnosis (诊断). And no one gives one faster than Google. Just enter your symptoms (症状) in a search window — the uncomfortable neck, headache, high body temperature, and it'll immediately tell what's wrong with you. You can almost enter your symptoms anytime and anywhere.
A study from Australia's Edith Cowan University-(ECU) looked into 36 international website-based symptom checkers. Researchers found they produced the correct diagnosis as the first result just 36% of the time. Online symptom checkers were also sometimes good and sometimes bad when it came to finding the right diagnosis within the top three results, with a rate of 52%. And the same websites managed to get the right diagnosis in their top 10 results 58% of the time.
"That could be a problem for a society, that more and more depends on websites for health advice. For example, according to the search records, about 7% of the questions Google receives are health-related, which works out to about 70,000 asks per minute. As for the answers, most of the time they are unreliable at best and can be dangerous at worst," says scientist Michela Hill.
The most popular health websites, like Google search simply don't know enough facts about the patient in question to make a correct diagnosis, especially his or her medical history and other symptoms. They usually can't look at the whole picture. Besides, websites' ways of producing a diagnosis are often not fully regulated or even monitored by government bodies.
That's not to say online symptom checkers don't play a role in the health of a society. As a means of monitoring outbreaks of certain diseases in public, they're already proving helpful. For example, the UK's National Health Service is using these tools to monitor symptoms and possible "hot spot" locations for certain diseases on a national basis. But if you're experiencing real pain or discomfort, the best advice Doc Google could offer would be to go and see a real doctor.
