Similarly, an Emergency Physician from Spokane noted “One can imagine the benefit to young doctors in developing countries who now have access to a grand medical library in their hands.”
Not only can a young doctor in a developing country use the giant search engine to figure out what is going on in the system of his patient, but the expatriate or traveler on the edge of the jungle in a developing country can use it to help with the self-care necessary when you are far from first-world resources.
Here in Mexico, a medical emergency is going on with my wife, and the medical resources are limited to my excellent cardiologist and little else. Medicine is decades behind and this jungle-edge area is even further removed from modern practices or cleanliness. The idea of Internet advice for third-world doctors and searches (Google or otherwise) available to help young and poorly-educated physicians seems like a worthy goal for Google and for services like Isabel. In medicine and the sciences, the more information, the better the service.
My little test of Google was to search “Dengue and dengue hemorrhagic fever,” which produced 290,000 results. They were primarily of the layman's type and included warnings of symptoms and outbreaks in places like Puerto Escondido and CDC travelers' warnings. I chose the subject which may not be a difficult diagnosis for most physicians who have any contact with tropical, contagious diseases; but there were also sites such as the National Library of Medicine and the National Institute of Health. Both showed more substantial articles on what is now considered an worldwide pandemic. It had piqued my interest after the brother-in-law of our bodyguard survived a bad attack just recently. A judicial policeman in an area of cruise ship excursions, rich part-time visitors and poor fishermen, the mosquitos found him anyway. A Mexican doctor would probably be able to diagnose it quickly. A North Dakotan might not immediately recognize the symptoms.
With my limited knowledge of both information technology and medicine, it is my belief that any addition to the arsenal of information available to medical professionals in both the developed and undeveloped world will be of immense benefit to global health and to the hope of stopping or slowing the scourges of pandemics that continue into the 21st century like dengue, polio, avian flu, and others.
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