Show HN: Search engine for trustworthy medical information

[eoravkin]

Hi HN,

I’d like to share MediSearch with you.

A few months ago, I had a knee injury and got several surgery options from doctors. I had to make an important decision, but the medical information search experience was terrible. The sites I found either did not answer my questions (long health blogs) or were too technical to easily understand (scientific papers). This gave me and my friend the idea for MediSearch.

Our goal is to build a system that provides direct accurate answers to medical questions based on trustworthy sources. We’d like to make MediSearch helpful to everyone and we still have a long way to go, so please let us know if you have any ideas or questions.

[raxxorraxor]

I think such system are the real future of digital medical systems instead these toy gadgets on your phone where people only try to heal their mid-life crisis.

As a test I asked "what is a stent?" and the answer was really good.

Perhaps this is the complete wrong approach because it would supercharge hypochondriacs, but it would be nice if I could search for symptoms and indications and be provided with a list of possible diagnoses as a support system not only for people seeking health care, but also for doctors that need to identify more exotic conditions.

Especially in non-urban regions where specialists might not be available, it could help with logistical problems of healthcare significantly.

Otherwise good job so far, looks really promising (I am not a doctor).

[eoravkin]

Thanks! Glad you liked it. Symptoms and indications --> diangosis is a bit more challenging. When we talked to some doctors, they always said that seeing the patient directly is very important. Perhaps a system like this could be a good complementary tool, or a better solution can be built on top of it.

[mpmmisko]

We’d be especially interested to hear if you had a similar experience with medical search, or if you think this is a made up problem. Thanks!

[padr]

This is awesome, I used it many times to help with biology research questions!