November 10, 2006 11:00pm

DOCTORS facing a patient with unusual symptoms could well be advised to use Google to pinpoint the cause, a test with Australian doctors suggests.In a study published yesterday in the British Medical Journal, Australian doctors were given 26 real-life cases of people who had fallen sick with relatively rare disorders.They were not told what diagnoses had been given in the case reports but did a Google search based on the symptoms that were presented.Google returned the right diagnosis in 15 out of the 26 cases – an accuracy rate of 58 per cent.

The disorders ranged from cirrhosis and the degenerative brain disorder Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, to cat-scratch disease, infective encephalitis and obscure conditions such as Henoch-Scholein purpura, Churg-Strauss syndrome and extrinsic allergic alveolitis.

“The web is rapidly becoming an important clinical tool for doctors,” the paper says.

The authors add a caveat, however: the results from Google are only as good as the knowledge base of the searcher – a caution that especially applies to patients who try to diagnose their own problems. END.

Yes, and isn’t this what many of us ordinary folk have been doing for years - searching Google - and often taking the ‘knowledge’ to the doctor, much to his or her chagrin.