You’re a young pitcher for the San Diego Padres, it’s early in the morning, and you’re not feeling good. In fact, you feel awful. So what do you do? Pick up your iPhone, point Safari at WebMD.com, punch in your symptoms, and self-diagnose yourself as having appendicitis. Next step? You call the team trainer at 3:15 AM, who does a quick examination and tells you to get to the hospital ASAP. A few hours later, your appendix is gone via a laparoscopic appendectomy, and you’re on the DL for a month or so.

Padres pitcher uses iPhone to self-diagnose appendicitis

Doctors need to start getting used to this. Next time you’re feeling ill with some weird symptoms, go to Google and type in those symptoms. When doing any kind of Google search, Google returns what you’re looking for 70% of the time on the first page and 95% of the time on the second page. Hunting for medical information is not that different from any other sort of information search. Dr. Google is there for you 24 hours a day…