We’ve all done it at one point: you experience a pain that you can’t explain, so before going to the doctor (or sometimes, instead of going to the doctor) you Google your symptoms. Before you know it, you’ve gone into a blackhole of link after link after link until you’ve finally convinced yourself that you’re dying from a tumor when in fact, what you feel is just some pain on your left wrist. Google wants to help you in this self-diagnosis journey by giving you more simplified results.
Now when you ask Google for symptoms like “headache on one side”, you’ll get a list of related conditions like headache, migraine, tension headache, etc so you can get more specific as to what kind of pain it is that you’re experiencing. For each individual symptom, you’ll also get an overview description, some self-treatment options, and if you should immediately go to the doctor or not. The “high quality medical information” has been collected from actual doctors for their Knowledge Graph.
But Google is also quick to point out that searching Google should only be for information purposes and any medical advice you get online should still be consulted with an actual doctor. There is a lot of useless and even harmful information out there so Google is also setting up a feedback mechanism so you can let them know if the information was helpful or not.
This update is rolling out on the Google mobile app and in the US and in English for now. They will eventually be expanding it to other territories and hopefully other languages as well.
SOURCE: Google
