LinkyIncreasingly patients are turning to Google rather than their physician as a first stop when seeking health care information. The reasons for this are many and mostly obvious: the internet is easily accessible, it is private and discrete (at least most people perceive it as such), and increasingly people are turning to the internet as the repository of all human knowledge. There is also a lot of health information on the web. Just a couple of years ago health care information surpassed pornography as the number 1 type of information on the web.
...
There have been a number of studies looking at the quality and accuracy of health care information on the internet, and it is no surprise that the results are mixed. A new study, just published online in the journal Cancer, looks at the quality of medical information on website discussing breast cancer. They found that 5.2% of the information found was inaccurate. This is pretty good, but not good enough for medical information - especially when people may be relying upon this information to make preliminary health care decisions.
...
In any case, the authors found that there were almost no criteria that predicted the accuracy of the information - no short cut to quality control. Except, that is, one feature that stood out. They wrote:
The odds of inaccuracy for webpages having CAM among their topics were approximately 15.6 times those of sites not having the complementary medicine topic.
Novella then follows that up with some hypotheses on why those results were found. Interesting read.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
