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"  Scouring WebMD and Wikipedia might not be the best way to figure out if you have appendicitis, liver cancer, or just cramps, but snapping a selfie and sending it to your dermatologist? A new study shows that actually works pretty well when determining whether you have a serious skin problem or not. Published in JAMA last week, the research pits doctors performing in-person skin consultations against ones doing &amp;quot;teledermatology,&amp;quot; or remote consultations via photos of the patient. Related: Skin Care Tips from Dermatologists The doctors working with a real live person and the ones working with just photos agreed a surprising amount of the time: When in-person doctors recommended a biopsy, the remote doctors who were going off of patients&amp;#039; photos did too, 95% of the time. And when the in-person doctor recommended same-day additional tests, the teledermatologists agreed 90% of the time. As for final diagnoses, they saw eye-to-eye completely 82% of the time, and mostly agreed in 88% of cases. Considering the national shortage of dermatologists and the rapid rate that melanoma&amp;#039;s growing at, the study seems like great news. It&amp;#039;s nice to finally have some proof that teledermatology (thus far considered an experimental field) and apps like AccessDerm work super-well. Verdict&amp;#039;s still out, though, on whether teledermatologists are giving style points for those selfies. Related: I Got DNA Tested to Determine My Skincare Regimen Photo credit: Selin Alemdar/Getty Images Via ELLE "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.cosmopolitan.com/health-fitness/news/a20857/teledermatology-skin-cancer-selfies/>