Can Your Computer Diagnose You?

All these health websites are starting to pop out symptom checkers. These handy devices are right there on your computer screen, waiting to give you a diagnosis. Does this mean you no longer need to go to the doctor?

If you enter "health" into Google, you will come up with nearly 900 million results. A good chunk of those are going to be health sites like CNN Health, WebMD and the like. Several of these websites allow you to check your symptoms online.

The reason this appeals to us is that many people are afraid to go to the doctor. You might be worried that he is going to tell you something terrible, or that he won't take you seriously. Not to mention, if you don't have insurance, it can be a costly affair. So, now, with the advent of virtual doctors, people are beginning to get an idea of what could be wrong, long before they seek medical attention.

A basic symptom checker will ask you to click on a picture of a body, in the area that you are having problems. You will then be asked to be more specific, selecting a joint or other area within a blown up picture. This allows the program to accurately grab the right questions to ask you.

Once you have narrowed down the area of the body, you will be asked a series of questions to rule out many problems. You will need to specify the type of pain, if you have it on both sides of your body, how it began, etc. The program discards any diseases and conditions that don't fit your specific symptoms and pops out a list of everything that you could possibly have wrong with you.

Now comes the hard part. You need to read through each and every disease to see if it sounds like what you have. This can be an absolute hell for hypochondriacs! Eventually, you will either find something that sounds like it could be what you are suffering from, or you will discard all the results and decide that the symptom checker is useless.

While there might come a point where a machine can do a better job of telling you what's wrong than a human can, that time hasn't come yet. The best that a computer program can do is give you some possible causes, but you still need to check with a doctor. A real one.