Never mind twerking, celebrity breakups and famous Internet animals. A fistful of healthcare-centric topics, things that actually matter, reside within Google’s Zeitgeist 2013. 

The annual compilation of most popular searches to cross its engines, Google Zeitgeist, so named for the term’s definition as the spirit of the times, examines what the world wanted to know during the past 12 months across literally dozens of categories.

Among those are two with a razor-sharp focus on health, those being health issues and health symptoms, as well as broader categories with notable connections to healthcare.

Health issues:

1. Flu
2. Cold
3. Labor
4. Diarrhea
5. Balance
6. Diet
7. Back pain
8. Allergies
9. Rash
10. Lupus

If that last one comes as something of a surprise, then you’re not alone. What’s more, Lupus also showed up on Google’s list of health symptoms, and two spots higher: 

1. Pregnancy
2. Influenza
3. Diabetes
4. Anxiety
5. Thyroid
6. HIV
7. Mononucleosis
8. Lupus
9. Herpes
10. Pneumonia

Lupus was in the international spotlight when a court in El Salvador ruled against granting a dying patient an abortion — and I’m not touching that one politically.

Read more: http://www.govhealthit.com/blog/healthcare-google-zeitgeist-2013

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