Do you think it's worse than WebMD? The problem with things like that is that (as it seems to me) they don't give you realistic answers, they give you "cover your ass" worst-case answers. That's why it triggers so much panic (speaking as someone roughly in the profile you describe). In a situation where you're actually talking to someone like on this site, perhaps there's hope that they give you realistic answers.

That said I agree that there is a potential problem, and there ought to be a good resource that gives you a good sense of what is a "reasonable" amount of worry. I'm not sure how that could be structured though, especially with the potential legal issues.

One thing I learned when I started getting actually sick and wasn't yet sure of the cause - don't read WebMD. It will always make you think you have cancer. Especially since at the time I was being tested for cancer, it was really scary. Every article felt like "Have a headache? Could be sinus pressure ....... or brain cancer".

I wonder where the point is that we can start to sue the lawyers who created this CYA environment for anxiety-induced heart conditions.

CrowdMed founder here, happy to chime in on this question.

We consider it up to our Medical Detectives to determine whether the patient's symptoms are physical or psychological in origin. If the latter, then 'somatization disorder' or 'hypochondriasis' are perfectly acceptable diagnostic suggestions.

That said, a lot of patients are given psychological diagnoses from physicians (i.e., "it's all in your head") only to discover on our site a physical root cause to their symptoms.

This is a beautiful thing. I have had a medical issue for a little over three years that no doctor can figure out, and I've concluded that doctors don't know how to troubleshoot. They know how to look at the symptoms, and if they have seen the issue a lot, or for some reason specialized in what you have, then they can solve it. Other than that, they don't know what to do, or who to refer you to.

I was thinking of starting an educational institution, and a hospital that would teach and have doctors who can troubleshoot. But I don't have the time, connections, or money to do something like that. It seems like you're taking a different approach, a much better approach. I hope this isn't a money grab, and I hope you change the world.

I would be very interested in seeing a list of diagnoses from cases that were solved correctly. It seems to me that once someone with a difficult to characterize condition has gone through 5-7 physicians, any 'diagnosis' that comes out at the end is either wrong or a placeholder until technology advances.

While we don't disclose our full list of final diagnoses, I can give you some statistics from our 700+ cases resolved to date:

-- no single diagnosis is more than 2% of the total, except for one (Lyme disease at 2.3%) -- 95% of these have come up as final diagnoses only once or twice in the history of the site

So it's fair to say that it's a VERY long-tail list. Also:

-- our current success rate is 70% (i.e., the patient told us that we brought them closer to a correct diagnosis or cure) -- about 50% of our final diagnoses are medically confirmed by the patient's doctor

These statistics are based on our post-case surveys, which not all of our patients answer, but they should be directionally accurate.

Lyme disease, or Chronic lyme disease?