Much has happened with Medical sites on the Internet in the past few years. First of all the medical Web has become even more important for Internet users and therefore more dangerous as a source of information.
While plenty of reliable medical information can be found on the Web, users don't always know how to distinguish the reliable from the undependable.
In a previous Web Watch article, I wrote that more and more frequently, Internet surfers are looking for answers about their illnesses on the Web; and just as frequently, there’s reason to wonder whether the Internet is a hot spot for dated and inaccurate medical information and “snake oil” cures.
With a large increase in websites devoted to health during the last two and a half years, some of them profiteering, and an increasing number of people looking for medical information on the Web, trustworthiness has become even more problematic.
I also noted previously that non-approved drugs and unproven remedies stand parallel with legitimate medicines on the Web. Some websites offer information guided by their own commercial or political interests. Surfers have discovered self-care on the Web, but the information they’ve found can sometimes be misleading or harmful.
Your health is precious. It shouldn’t be risked by wrong information or improper medication. The value of the Internet lies in its usefulness as a cross check on questionable medical advice and as a source of information that the doctor didn’t have time to give you. The key to benefiting from the Medical Web comes from learning how to tell whether a website has reliable information.
In a new study carried out by URAC, Garry Carneal, the president and CEO said "Searches for health information are one of the most common reasons consumers use the Internet," One of our greatest challenges is helping consumers find the information they want that is also accurate, reliable and presented in an accessible format."
They found four major problems with the use of the web for obtaining medical information:
1) consumers' ability to locate and evaluate health information online is hindered by access barriers for older, less well off, disabled, and non-English speaking people;
2) a difficulty in distinguishing credible health information from that which is not trustworthy;
3) Web sites contain inaccurate, outdated or incomplete information; and
4) consumers lack of knowledge on how search engines retrieve results or the impact of paid placements on listings of health Web sites.
Let's consider these. "Access barriers" can only be removed by more people having computers with connections to the Internet and knowing how to read English.
The ability to "distinguish credible information" requires knowledge of how to evaluate what's found on any website.
At Virtual
Chase, you'll find guidelines to follow. They're summarized as follows. Before you rely on information, you should:
1) Determine its origin.
2) Discover the author and the publisher.
3) Ascertain the author's and publisher's credentials.
4) Discover the date of the writing. This gives the information historical context.
5) Verify it. Find another reputable source that provides similar information.
Visit the website for details of how to apply these guidelines. These
guidelines also help users to distinguish whether or not the information on a website is inaccurate, outdated or incomplete. You’ll find an excellent checklist for evaluating the quality of information on the Internet. This applies not only to medical information but to any topic where you're concerned with accuracy, dependability and objectivity.
Consumers also need to know that search engines don't retrieve information based on reliability. They scan the World Wide Web using robots to pick up key words from websites and they give preference to sites that pay to get higher listings in the search engines.
If, for instance, you type "best medical websites" into Google's search engine, the first one that comes up happens to be one of the "snake oil" sites, only they're selling Viagra, cheap diet and other weight loss pills.
Thus, if someone is selling medical equipment or services or pharmaceuticals, the information they provide may be much less reliable than that provided by a non-profit organization. Recently, there's been a plethora of new sites peddling drugs without prescriptions.
Healthline is
a specialized search engine that focuses exclusively on reliable,
doctor-vetted information, covering 62,000 web sites with between
45-50 million pages. The site also features hosted content licensed
from reliable content providers.
According to Chris Sherman, "Healthline is one of the best, easiest to
use health information sources I've yet found on the web. The "patient
friendly" interface combined with first-rate, vetted content make it
an excellent resource for anyone researching health related
information."
The Center for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC), located in America, has been accessed from around the world for its up-to-date information. They have reliable information on everything from birth defects, diseases and conditions, the major causes of death to workplace safety and health and much more.
Each of the Health and Safety topics has a page with a list of topics that can easily be accessed along with a number of links to other related sites. The topics covered and the information available is exceptionally comprehensive.
In addition to 10 Health and Safety topics, the CDC has a number of publications and a free subscription service to a number of lists, services and updates. They also provide health and disease related data collected from various health services.
Pub Med
produced by the National Library of Medicine has over 14 million citations for biomedical articles back to the 1950. The citations come from MEDLINE and various life science journals. Both abstracts and articles can be accessed.
Just to try it out, I entered "statins" (the drugs prescribed to lower cholesterol) in the search box, and immediately got a summary index of the first 20 of 2986 articles on the subject. They were listed with the most recent first.
The second item on the list had been reported in the news just a day or two before and taken up in a health ezine that I subscribe to. When I clicked on the index entry, I had an abstract of the article in one or two seconds. I then clicked on a small icon that took me to the full text of the article in The
New England Journal of Medicine.
This is an amazing facility for both medical professionals and for people interested in getting medical information from almost any published source. Keep in mind that many of the articles have been written for members of the medical profession and the language can be difficult for non- professionals.
In the UK, Omni offers free access to a searchable catalogue of Internet sites covering health and medicine. They didn't happen to be quite as up-to-date as Pub Med on the latest studies, but they had plenty of useful information on cholesterol. The information on the Omni website is much more readable for non-professionals than Pub Med.
A number of websites of institutes with established reputations among members of the
medical profession provide useful sources of information:
Sweden's Karolinska Institutet, one of Europe's largest medical universities provides easy access to an alphabetic list
of every imaginable disease/disorder in addition to access to a number
of databases, journals, electronic books and biomedical links.
My favorite medical website in America is WebMD Health. It's loaded with valuable health information, medical expertise and clear content. They live up to their editorial policy: "to bring you objective, trustworthy, and timely health information.
The internationally known and respected
Mayo Clinic
provides another excellent website in the US with medical information about diseases, disorders and drugs that’s both comprehensive and up-to-date.
In the UK, the choice for reputable medical information,
Medicdirect
feature clinics and a "disorders" section with information about every conceivable ailment. Add their information about lab tests, fitness, homeopathic medicines, drugs and prescriptions and you have a health site winner.
For answers to your medical questions, MedlinePlus, the website of the US National Institute of Health and the US National Library of Medicine
has numerous helpful resources.
For an exceptionally useful page of medical resources on the Internet,
Reva Basch has compiled lists of Medical Sites
along with Current Medical News, Reference Books Online, Journals and Newsletters, Databases and more.
When you're looking for medical information about a medical problem that you or your family or friends might have, remember to avoid the fly-by-night sites selling fake cures and the undependable sources of content about your condition.
If you're not among the many who visit the Internet for medical information, you may have learned what Lewis Thomas observed: "The great secret of doctors, known only to their wives, but still hidden from the public, is that most things get better by themselves; most things, in fact, are better in the morning."
Stay well, but if you can’t, see your physician and then go to the best Internet sources to learn more about your condition and treatment that your physician didn’t have time to explain.
