- People looking to a popular online symptom checker for answers about eye problems often get a wrong diagnosis, a small study suggests.
"Ultimately, what's at stake here is the patient's vision and peace of mind," said lead study author Dr. Carl Shen of McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. When the symptom checker generated a long list of possible diagnoses, the correct one was usually 4 or 5 places down the list, on average, not in the top three.
"The version of the WebMD Symptom Checker used in this study represents the older version of the online tool, which did not use the latest algorithm and technology that drives the current version," Dr. Michael Smith, chief medical director for WebMD, said in an emailed statement.
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