Dr. Google's top ten doesn't give complete medical information

 

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Editor - Is Google the way to get the best advice on sports medicine?  A study in a recent journal says the information on the Internet is quite incomplete and varies widely, so folks don't get the whole picture.

A study published in the July 2010 issue of the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (JBJS) describes how Internet users don't get the information they need from the Internet and need to ask questions as well of health personnel.

"The reason that we decided to undertake this study is that patients are presenting to their physicians office with increasing frequency armed with printouts of information obtained from the Internet," said Madhav A. Karunakar, MD, an orthopaedic surgeon at Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, N.C., and one of the study's authors.

The researchers go on to say, "Physicians and patients should be aware that the quality of information available online varies greatly. Additionally, physicians should be prepared to discuss this information with their patients in order to ensure that it is not misinterpreted."

Three-quarters of the U.S. population has access to the Internet, and more than half of those people go online for health-related information at least once a month, but they don't get the health information that is needed because health information has grown faster than the Internet in terms of Internet use.

The study's authors chose ten of the most common sports medicine diagnoses, reviewing the information online about them, including medial collateral ligament, rotator cuff tear, etc.

After this the researchers proceeded to review the top ten search results for each diagnosis, looking for how complete the information was about these conditions, its correctness and clarity of information.  They also looked at the information source, whether it was an institution, individual news source, doctor, or commercial enterprise.

Nonprofit sites scored the highest in terms of content, followed by academic sites, including medical journal sites and non-sales oriented sources such as WebMd and eMedicine.

The least accurate information sources were newspaper articles and personal web sites. and among the worst those with financial interests in a given product for a given diagnosis.

"About 20 percent of the sites that turned up in the top ten results were sponsored sites," Dr. Karunakar says. "These site owners are motivated to promote their product, so the information found there may be biased. We also found that these sites rarely mentioned the risks or complications associated with treatment as they are trying to represent their product in the best possible light."

The study's authors suggest that patients be counseled to avoid commercial Web sites, with the exception of the most reputable sites, such as WebMD and eMedicine, and similar sites.

"Despite its shortcomings, the Internet is the future of how patients will obtain information to make their healthcare decisions," says Dr. Karunakar. "Therefore, patients and physicians need to make sure they are getting that information from reputable, accurate sources."