I am searching for a quality self diagnostics expert system similar to http://www.easydiagnosis.com (seams quite good) . Are there other avaliable for free ?
1 Answer
There are quite a few free symptom checkers available online, for example:
- Symptify
- WebMD
- Mayo Clinic
- Patient.info (based on Isabel symptom checker)
You can type in symptoms or choose them from the lists of 50-90 symptoms or so.
The tools can be useful if your symptom combinations are typical for a certain disease. They can greatly narrow down the possible causes and, on the other hand, remind you of the causes you didn't think of.
The pretty much only benefit of these tools is that they may help you judge if you have a serious disease that may need to be treated by a doctor or you can let it heal on its own.
The downsides include, for example, inability to guess the exact type of infection and getting misleading results when your symptom combinations are not typical, like, say, in pneumonia without fever.
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1I think the biggest problem is false-positives. In medicine, you don’t do unnecessary tests because every test comes with a certain false-positive risk, and the one thing you do not want to do is worry a healthy patient by a (erroneous) diagnosis. Here, the false-positive test is having a false diagnosis. Because all those tools are solely based on symptoms and not probability and experience and diagnosis tools, you will have hundreds of false positives (or potential diseases). This is only scaremongering and doesn’t help you.– NarusanCommented Jan 14, 2019 at 16:49
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1I was very excited when I first checked these tools, but now I don't find them attractive at all. They are presented in a quite confident way, but just the fact there's no doctor as a person on the other side makes them unreliable.– JanCommented Jan 14, 2019 at 17:02