If you're looking for a leisurely afternoon read, check out this article on a woman who taught herself genetics to understand two rare diseases she'd been diagnosed with, and then used her newfound knowledge to link the two:

Kim was convinced that she had found the cause of her two diseases, but the only way to know for sure was to get the DNA of her LMNA gene sequenced to see if she had a mutation. First, she had to convince scientists that she was right. She started with Grogan, presenting her with the findings of her research. Grogan was impressed, but pragmatic. Even if Kim was right, it would not change her fate. Her implant was keeping her heart problems under control, and her Charcot–Marie–Tooth disease was incurable. He didn’t see a point. But Kim did. “I wanted to know,” she says. “Even if you have a terrible prognosis, the act of knowing assuages anxiety. There’s a sense of empowerment.”

In November 2010 Kim presented her case to Ralitza Gavrilova, a medical geneticist at the Mayo Clinic. She got a frosty reception. Gavrilova told Kim that her odds of being right were slim. “I got this sense that she thought I’d made an unfounded shot in the dark,” says Kim. “That I didn’t understand the complexity of the genome. That I had been reading the internet, and they come up with all sorts of things there.”

The story continues down an interesting rabbit hole of how the internet has empowered those suffering from rare diseases and genetic conditions to do their homework—how curiosity and tenacity and Google can occasionally accomplish the same results as the country's best geneticists. Of course, there's this:

But for every Kim, there are others who research their own conditions and come up with wrong answers. In one study four non-specialist volunteers tried to diagnose 26 cases from the New England Journal of Medicine by Googling the symptoms. They got less than a quarter right. Genetic diseases arguably lend themselves to confusion and misinformation. They are often both debilitating and enigmatic, and getting sequenced can offer little comfort beyond a diagnosis. If mainstream science has no easy answers to offer, many patients will follow any lead, no matter how weak. “There’s a tendency for people to spin very convoluted stories on tenuous threads of evidence. Even scientists do that,” says MacArthur. “I have heard of a lot of rare-disease patients who come up with hypotheses about their disease, and very few turn out to be correct.”

Which is why I have created my own hybrid of Google MDing and consulting qualified medical professionals: Whenever I discover a new mole or physical irregularity I take a picture of it in a restaurant bathroom (the lighting is fantastic!) and text it to all my medical friends with, "IS THIS FATAL YES/NO?" The practice has kept me alive and well to this day.