Using the Internet to Obtain Health Information
Accessing Credible Health Advice from the Web
May 6, 2009
These days there is so much of information available on the internet that patients are much more knowledgeable than they were during the last century.
Just opening up a search engine like Google and typing in a word like "Gallbladder" brings up over three million hits. If one tries Google-searching a phrase like "High Blood Pressure" one gets as many as 34 million hits - while refining the search with the medical term "Hypertension" brings up no less than 21 million results!
How does one know which of these millions of sites is authentic and which are not to be trusted?
A couple of useful websites are MedlinePlus — a service of the US National Library of Medicine and the National Institute of Health — and that maintained by the Foundation for Medical Education and Research of the famous Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Although both these sites are directed at the American population, the information provided is authentic and well presented. Moreover, navigating through these sites to find information is not difficult, even for beginners.
Doctor Patient Relationship
In the past, the relationship between doctors and patients was a bit like the God-like doctor being the repository of all medical information. Patients respectfully consulted the doctor with a problem, and like those folk who in ancient times consulted the oracle at Delphi or the priest in the temple, they were told what to do. There was no possibility of asking for an explanation or even querying the doctor’s diagnosis — understanding medical matters and the intricate working of the human body was considered too much for "ordinary people".
Partners in Management of Disease
Now that the world has moved into the 21st century, the times they are a'changing. With people having more access to information, patients and their doctors have to become partners in the management of diseases. Physicians can tell their patients what to do, what tablets to take, what lifestyle changes they need to adopt to avoid getting a stroke or heart attack — but whether patients accept that advice, even whether they take the tablets as they are supposed to take them or change their eating habits, depends on the patient and the relationship or trust they have with their doctor.
How to Evaluate Medical Information on the Net
With information being so freely available on the Internet, patients can always get a second opinion - provided they know where to look and how to search properly. Evaluating the quality of the information found on the web can be helped by paying attention to the following basic criteria:
- When was this information written? Advice posted in 1999 could well be out of date in 2009!
- Who is the author - and are what his or her qualifications? Anyone can post an article on the internet nowadays - but information provided by a qualified doctor or researcher from a recognised medical school (better still, by a group of such doctors) has greater credibility than information posted by some unqualified individual who has only an agenda to peddle or a product to market.
- Is the information provided from a university department, a well known hospital or an official government institution? Such information is much more likely to be authentic as it can be assumed to be backed by research evidence and/or be reviewed by peers before publication.
In the Information Age in which we find ourselves today, even physicians would admit that patients having access to information about their diseases and medications can be beneficial.
Just so long as the information they access is credible and up to date.
