Medical Economics on Google for Doctors
Can Google make you a better doctor?
Tech Talk
Mar 2, 2007
By: Robert Lowes
Medical Economics
Includes interesting commentary on the BMJ article on “Googling for a Diagnosis” from last November.
(Previously mentioned here, here, here and here)
“The cases in the BMJ article deal with diagnoses so rare that most physicians will never make them in their lifetime,” Armstrong says. “Google is useful for them, but not for common conditions where presenting complaints are vague, like ‘nausea, fatigue, generalized muscle pain.’ Google would yield a morass of disorganized information with no built-in quality filter. I can’t think of a single person in the EBM field who would use Google on a regular basis.”
Armstrong says the BMJ study would have been more convincing had it compared Google with EBM search engines such as the TRIP Database (for more information, see “The best treatment? It’s at your fingertips,” in the March 4, 2005 issue). Interestingly enough, Jon Brassey, a co-founder and co-director of TRIP (www.tripdatabase.com), holds Google in higher regard. “Google isn’t anywhere near as good as TRIP,” Brassey wrote in a blog. “But it’s pretty fine.”
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March 20th, 2007 at 11:30 am
I am very, very afraid.
March 20th, 2007 at 11:33 am
Care to elaborate, Mary?
March 20th, 2007 at 11:33 am
Okay, let me expand on that initial thought. I feel like we repeat the same things over and over again, but again this is a case where we need to educate clinicians on how to use this tool and what type of information they are getting when they use it. You want a quick diagnosis, yes this may be a good bet. You want evidence based answers, hrm…not so much.