Maybe even better than staying at a Holiday Inn Express...

Looks like all these years I've devoted to the study of medicine were a waste of time. Apparently, anyone with enough curiosity and an internet connection can do a reasonably good job of diagnosing disease with the help of Google.

Dr Tang and Dr Ng selected 26 difficult cases presented in the New England Journal of Medicine, including Cushing's syndrome, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, encephalitis and cirrhosis.

They then plugged the symptoms of each case into the search engine to come up with a diagnosis.

When these diagnoses were compared with the correct published diagnoses, the researchers found that Google got it right 58 per cent of the time.

The article goes on to say:

Doctors have been estimated to carry 2 million facts in their heads to help them to diagnose disease, the researchers say.

Unfortunately, sometimes I feel like I've replaced 1.5 million of those slots with useless trivia that I find to put on this blog!