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February 21, 2003
medical information online
In between phone calls on practical issues, I worked on my paper concerning the reliability of medical information on the Web. As a little experiment, I tried searching for "mononucleosis" on Google. (MEDLINEplus, the ambitious federal portal, notes that "mononucleosis" is one of the most common search terms on its site. Since the disease is not serious but lacks a cure, some reasonable patients and parents may want to diagnose it and treat the symptoms on their own.)
I noticed a few things:
- First, MEDLINEplus does not appear very prominently among the search results. Sites with much less funding and institutional support, and with much less detailed information, are at least as prominent on the Web. Indeed, a Hungarian student who once had mononucleosis and has written 700 words on the subject is almost as prominent as MEDLINEplus, which is a major product of a federal agency with a $250 million annual budget.
- Second, it is difficult to make an accurate diagnosis of mononucleosis using the Internet, because its symptoms vary and resemble the symptoms of other diseases (including HIV/AIDS). There is a fairly reliable blood test that only a physician can conduct. Therefore, many people who suspect that they have mononucleosis will learn from the Web that they may be right, but their diagnosis must be confirmed by a physician. The value of using the Internet in this case is somewhat limited.
- Third, you are more likely to find yourself using MEDLINEplus if you know that you are interested in "mononucleosis" (a scientific term), rather than if you only know that you have fever, headache, swollen glands, tiredness, and malaise (the main symptoms of the disease). If you look for symptoms, most of the sites you find with Google will be irrelevant or unreliable.
- Fourth, the apparent reliability of prominent sites that describe
mononucleosis differ widely, but the main information that they offer
is similar (with the exception of the material on homeopathy that appears
in some of the non-governmental sites.) Even the 700-word site constructed
by a Hungarian student offers fundamentally the same message as MEDLINEplus—on
this particular topic.
Posted by peterlevine at February 21, 2003 04:12 PM
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