The best medical information site in the world? The WWW.

According to researchers quoted in the UK's Daily Mail article "Doctors using Google to diagnose illnesses," "almost six-in-10 difficult cases can be solved by using the world wide web as a diagnostic aid."

Misdiagnosis is still a common occurrence in the medical profession despite all the tools available such as the blood tests and state of the art scanning equipment.

Studies of autopsies have shown doctors seriously misdiagnose fatal illnesses about 20 per cent of the time.

So millions of patients are being treated for the wrong disease. And the more astonishing fact may be that the rate has not really changed since the 1930s.

So a team at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane identified 26 difficult diagnostic cases published in the New England Journal of Medicine last year, including obscure conditions such as Cushing's syndrome and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

They selected three to five search terms from each case and did a Google search while blind to the correct diagnoses. Google gives users quick access to more than three billion medical articles.

The researchers then selected and recorded the three diagnoses that were ranked most prominently and appeared to fit the symptoms and signs, and compared the results with the correct diagnoses as published in the journal.

Google searches found the correct diagnosis in 15 (58 per cent) of cases. Respiratory and sleep physician Dr Hangwi Tang, who led the study, said: "Doctors adept at using the internet use Google to help them diagnose difficult cases.

The research team's leader, Dr. Hangwi Tang, endorses "googling" difficult-to-diagnose diseases and states that clinicians should be trained in how to use search engines to improve their practice of medicine.

The comments are really interesting, running the whole gamut of responses.