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from the and-your-dr.-is-always-right-first-time dept.
For your typical hypochondriac, online symptom checkers are a rabbit hole of medical information and the anxiety that comes with it. But according to a new study led [PDF] by researchers at the Harvard Medical School, most of these sites are so inconsistent and inaccurate that patients shouldn't rely upon them for correct diagnoses.
In the study, which was published in the British Medical Journal, the researchers looked at 23 web sites from around the world that claim to offer information for diagnosis and triage (assessing how urgently a condition needs to be treated). They used 45 patient vignettes, about half of which were common conditions, to assess the sites' accuracy.
They found that the correct diagnosis came up first only 34 percent of the time. Half the sites had the right answer in their top three results, and almost 60 percent had it in the top 20. Triage advice fared a bit better, with accurate suggestions coming up first 57 percent of the time. The sites in which the right answer came up as the first result most often were: DocResponse (50 percent), Family Doctor (47 percent), and Isabel (44 percent).
What has been the experience of SN Members? Do they rely on online medical diagnosis?
[Also Covered By]: http://commonhealth.wbur.org/2015/07/self-diagnosing-health-websites-study
Original Submission
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bradley13 on Tuesday July 14 2015, @07:46AM
I've successfully diagnosed some things online - to the point of going to the hospital and insisting on the test that proved it. Once, after getting a diagnosis from a doctor that I just didn't believe (being sent home with a lung embolism, thanks, doc). If I may ramble a bit, I have the following thoughts:
If you have something new, i.e., you have no experience with the disease and don't just recognize it, it can be very difficult to describe your symptoms in an objective, measurable fashion. The online diagnosis sites, accordingly, cannot pose really discriminating questions, because two people with the exact same symptom may describe it differently. Hence, there really is no way for an online diagnosis site to have a high accuracy rate. A good doctor can work against this ambiguity by judging how the patient answers questions (is this a "whiner" or a "tough guy", for example), and posing follow-up questions.
What's useful is that the online sites provide a range of possible diagnoses, and you can visit multiple sites and see how well their lists match up. What I did was to then take the diseases they proposed, read the medical descriptions of the diseases (articles aimed at medical personnel, not at patients) and work backwards: If your patient has this disease, then they will have the following symptoms. Coming from this perspective, you can eliminate the diagnoses that make no sense, for example, because only some of your symptoms match up.
In the end, as an intelligent lay-person, it took a lot of hours of reading medical literature that was (as a non-medical type) barely understandable, plus a willingness to look at things as objectively as possible. Of course, none of this is going to help a hypochondriac, who wants the attention that goes with the worst possible diagnosis.
tl;dr: The diagnosis sites are a great starting point, but they are only a starting point. You certainly shouldn't rely on them alone for anything of critical importance.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by penguinoid on Tuesday July 14 2015, @10:16AM
tl;dr: The diagnosis sites are a great starting point, but they are only a starting point. You certainly shouldn't rely on them alone for anything of critical importance.
Like your health ;-)
RIP Slashdot. Killed by greedy bastards.