Google versus the doctors

I didn’t know, or at least wasn’t aware, that too much paracetamol can damage the liver, until I read it on Twitter. I did a Google search and, sure enough, it’s true. Ever since, I keep insisting at home that nobody overdo the paracetamol when they have a headache.

In 2006 English doctors ran a study in which they took 26 cases from the New England Journal of Medicine and searched Google for the symptoms. Comparing the search engine’s results with the medical journal’s, they got a correct diagnosis in 58% of the cases (I’d like to know what a doctor’s diagnosis rate is, to compare them).

The study’s conclusion was that as more information on real cases becomes available on the web, search engines will be an ever more valuable tool for doctors.

Google has been adding medical information to its databases for a while now, among other sources directly from people, through Google Health.

Could George Lucas’s vision of medical droids, like the one in the picture, come true some day?

For healing wounds, mending broken bones, providing intensive care or a treatment, it may well happen. Better search engines and better artificial intelligence systems could end up producing a robot doctor with diagnostic abilities better than a human’s. Why not? What would be wrong with that?

I think the added value human doctors provide, the thing that makes them irreplaceable, is empathy, respect and compassion for their patients. Sadly, many doctors today don’t bother with that, and have turned into money-making machines. Given that reality, I welcome any advance that lets us automate medicine.