Via Techdirt -
A new study from a group of Australian doctors says that Google can help doctors diagnose tricky cases.
It's hard to know exactly why they needed a study to figure this out -- it would seem like doctors would be pretty familiar with searching reference materials if they needed help making a diagnosis, and given the wealth of knowledge that's online, as well as instances where it's proven helpful to doctors, you'd think they'd have figured it out by now. But perhaps the bigger point is to emphasize the value of collective, shared knowledge.
One of the common retorts from critics of the likes of Wikipedia is that using it, or other internet sources, is like letting a crowd of untrained people perform brain surgery. That's patently false, and when you have a group of trained, intelligent people (in this case, doctors), that are able to pick out the expert resources from the unreliable ones, the crowd and its shared knowledge can be quite useful.
Of course, Google and the internet as a whole can be quite a boon to cyberchondriacs, and people who think they can diagnose themselves by looking things up online.
However, the internet won't replace doctors -- it just offers them a tool to supplant the Physician's Desk Reference, medical journals and other more traditional resources.
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