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People Increasingly Using Google to Self Diagnose

by Terrence O'Brien on March 21, 2009 at 01:39 PM

People Increasingly Using Google to Self Diagnose
Sure the Internet and Google are great for looking up information, since there's almost nothing you can't find out with a little search engine ninjitsu. The downside is that this ability has turned us all into pseudo experts on any topic we can Google.

This means we that we often head straight for the computer to Google our symptoms any time we get so much as a sniffle. We've all done it, and sometimes, we end up fearing for the worst. But surfing for diagnoses may not be such a bad thing, as the case of Denzil Searle demonstrates. According to a recent article in the Daily Telegraph, Searle, a design engineer in Cornwall, England, went online after being unpersuaded by his doctor's diagnosis of a mysterious illness. After some fleet-fingered Internet searching, he became convinced that he had Lyme disease. He went to a specialist, who confirmed the self-diagnosis. If it weren't for his paranoia, the condition might have been missed completely, but Searle got his medication and got better.

More often, though, plugging your symptoms into a search engine does nothing but worry you and frustrate your doctor when he tries to explain to you that you have a cold, not the plague. It's great to have this fast source of knowledge at our disposal and to be able to do our own research, but remember, you're not a doctor... unless you are. In which case, carry on. [From: Telegraph]

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Tags: diagnosis, google, health, internet, web

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