What do black and white striped equines and tricky medical cases with surprising diagnoses have in common? They are both referred to as zebras.

In medicine, students are taught  a rule of thumb coined by Dr. Theodore Woodward in the 1940’s: “When you hear hoofbeats behind you, don’t expect to see a zebra”. In other words, if a patient is exhibiting symptoms of a common cold, don’t expect they have whooping cough, for example. However, there are rare occasions when a case is difficult to diagnose and lacking common or familiar symptoms to assess. For these cases there is FindZebra.

This database serves to help practitioners diagnose difficult patient cases. Though still in BETA form, FindZebra contains an extensive databank of rare diseases to either browse or search for by entering a patient’s symptoms. Simply listing the symptoms will suffice to retrieve a list of diseases. The search engine also shows users the source which provided a given result. These results  not only include the name of the foundation, government branch, organization, etc., but also provide links to the resources for users to read and learn more.

FindZebra, other medical search engines, as well as helpful resources like dictionaries and style manuals can be found on the Reference Resources LibGuide.