A recent Danish study asked people to post symptoms of a medical problem on their Facebook page and ask their friends to come up with possible diagnoses. They found that the correct diagnosis was suggested in five out of the six presented cases after a median time of ten minutes. They described the responses from “relevant differential diagnoses to very silly diagnostic suggestions.”
I’m glad the researchers did not conclude that people can rely on their Facebook friends for making medical diagnoses. Instead, they suggested that people can use their Facebook friends to figure out if they should see a doctor for their symptoms. Although this is not a groundbreaking study, it points to the potential utility of crowdsourcing in medical research. The company Patients Like Me has been at this for some time, with about 125,000 patients detailing over 1000 conditions on their website.
