When people experience aches, pains, or strange rashes, their first line of defense has become the Internet. Each month, 74 million people visit WebMD, the number one website portal for healthcare (Bogart). Older than Google itself, WebMD is one of many other websites professing to provide medical diagnoses based on patient search queries. WebMD offers symptom checkers, allowing users to input things like, “shortness of breath,” or “trouble sleeping” and receive an instant diagnosis. Unfortunately, the diagnosis a person receives when using WebMD is unlikely to be accurate. Worse yet, using WebMD and other websites with symptom checkers can lead to what Crane calls “cyberchondria,” a type of hypochondria related to the fact that symptom checkers often yield diagnoses like “cancer” for having a bellyache.

Besides, medical conditions are not possible to diagnose accurately online, without a full physical evaluation by a qualified physician. Even “crowdcoursing” medicine, using tools like CrowdMed.com, can be problematic because patients do not see a doctor in person. Using CrowdMed or any other crowdsourcing tool, the patient is under the illusion that they are being seen by a group of qualified healthcare providers when in fact, these sites offer no safeguards against quackery. Online symptom checkers and even the more robust “crowdsourcing” methods of medical diagnoses are problematic because they subvert the rigorous methods used by qualified physicians to address patient concerns.

When discussing the issues with crowdsourcing medicine and online diagnoses, it is important to differentiate between the types of online healthcare tools. WebMD and other healthcare media sites can include symptom checkers, but not necessarily live access to a team of doctors and nurses. Because of the limitations of WebMD in providing patients with virtual human interaction, Jared Heyman founded a company called CrowdMed.com. CrowdMed.com is unlike WebMD in that instead of using a database of articles in an encyclopedia or reference guide format, CrowdMed.com is a service-based solution involving interactions between patients and a community of online individuals.

Based in San Francisco, CrowdMed.com is different from WebMD in several ways. First, users pay to access the system, and the “medical detectives,” as they are called, get paid to provide advice. MedMD offers some means for patients to seek actual interactions with people, and has links to...

WebMD also hires random writers and editors rather than relying fully on physicians and scientists to write and monitor the content on the site, but CrowdMed does offer the possibility for patients to seek solutions from actual doctors (Sanghavi).
Third, there is a greater level of interactivity when using CrowdMed.com versus using WebMD, which is a media-based system including pre-written articles on various medical conditions and topics. Unlike users of WebMD, the person using CrowdMed has a two-way conversation with the “medical detectives,” (“Blind Spot”). The conversation is virtual, much different than it would be in a face-to-face medical scenario. Yet for many patients, this is preferable, particularly for those who live in rural regions without access to physicians or experts, or for people with debilitating or embarrassing conditions. The CrowdMD model might also be helpful for patients who do not have insurance.

Because of the way crowdsourcing works, even some doctors have supported the CrowdMed model and work on the side as “medical detectives” to increase the accuracy and credibility of the diagnostic method (Sanghavi). Healthcare workers are not necessarily in violation of the Hippocratic Oath when they participate in online medical diagnosis sites, when their goal is to improve patient outcomes and increase access to healthcare resources. Critics of both WebMD and CrowdMed, however, claim that physicians are violating the Hippocratic Oath—the principle philosophical doctrine guiding the medical practice (Bogart). Healthcare workers need to guard against unsafe or unethical uses of the crowdsourcing or online diagnostic tools like WebMD. Making medicine more accessible to all people is ultimately a good thing, but needs to take place within the rubric of evidence-based practice.

Both WebMD and CrowdMed are profit-driven models, paralleling the American healthcare system in general. In fact, WebMD has become the market leader with annual revenues as high as $700 million (Bogart 1). These sites capitalize on the fact that all people experience some physical or mental ailment and are interested in self-diagnosing, and…