The Google Doctor Is a Reminder of How Badly the Internet Does Real Medicine

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Let’s be honest: Healthcare on the internet still doesn’t work.

Two decades since the dawn of the web, you’d think the best tool ever invented for connecting people with information—and each other—would offer better ways to practice medicine. Instead, a Google search for nearly any health issue results in a cascade of SEO-optimized link bait—symptom lists and forums presided over by the uninformed. Instead of internet medicine, we have cyber-chondria.

Now, Google is trying out a new tool that could finally offer a direct online connection to legitimate medical advice. Some symptom-searchers will get the chance to video-chat with a live, degree-having doctor about their issues. If it works, it could provide a path out of the tangle of misinformation saturates so many sites. More than anything, however, the experiment highlights just how hard it is to do real medicine on the internet.

jasonahoule/Reddit

News of the doctor-chat tool first surfaced on Reddit, where a user posted a screenshot of a “talk with a doctor” link that appeared at the top of search results for knee pain. Google later confirmed that it was offering the tool as part of a trial in its Helpouts live video advice service.

“When you’re searching for basic health information—from conditions like insomnia or food poisoning—our goal is provide you with the most helpful information available,” Google told Gizmodo. “We’re trying this new feature to see if it’s useful to people.”

The key concept in Google’s statement is “the most helpful information available.” It’s a tacit acknowledgement that most searches for symptoms and ailments on Google result in information that’s not that useful. And for Google, that’s a problem. People aren’t about to stop Googling for “vague tingling in my left arm” anytime soon. But over time, users will start turning to other sites that show they can do a better job at telling you whether that tingling means you just need to take a typing break or drop everything and go to the ER because you’re having a heart attack.

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Of utmost concern for Google is Facebook, which is reportedly experimenting with its own health care services. As a social platform, Facebook is already more intuitively designed to provide users with professional-grade medical information by connecting them with real medical professionals. Google’s video-chat option is a far less natural fit for the company’s search-driven, web-based Knowledge Graph. Google has thrived because it’s really good at sorting information that’s already out there, not at getting people to look up that information for you.

Aside from the question of how much a doctor can really tell you without seeing you in person, the effectiveness of Googling an M.D. will depend on how well it scales. The world couldn’t possibly have enough doctors to personally advise everyone every time they Google for “eye twitch” or “calf rash.” Google may eventually charge for the service, which shrink the pool of potential users. But once you’re paying for a doctor’s time online, why not just go to the doctor?

The lack of good health care options on the internet is in part a consequence of the sheer complexity of connecting so many pieces (doctors, patients, insurers, regulators) and addressing so many issues (privacy, quality, liability, affordability) all at once. Eventually, tech companies will figure out the limits of what works in online medicine, though the process is already taking eons on the super-compressed time scale of internet. One limit, however, is already self-evident: To do medicine well, doctors often have to be able to reach out and touch someone for real.