Navigating On-Line Health

Here's the advice of the Medical Library Association and other experts about how to surf for the most accurate, comprehensive and
user-friendly health sites.
Consider the source. Who sponsors the site and produces its material? Is it the American Cancer Society or some hobbyist
posting from his basement? Click "About" or "About us" on the home page to fine out who sponsors the site. A general rule of
thumb is that sites with Web addresses ending with .edu are universities, .com sites are commercial enterprises, .org sites are
nonprofits and .gov sites are, of course, the government.
Is the site trying to sell you something? Some .com sites support excellent content, with advertising; some may be posted by
a reputable health care provider, such as a hospital. But other sites simply want to grab your attention to pitch products.
Check when the page was last updated, which is often posted at the bottom. As scientific evidence emerges, a new study can
contradict an earlier one. Mary L. Ryan, president-elect of the Medical Library Association, says some authors "throw up a site" and
then neglect to keep it it current.
Start on solid ground. If you're doing a major search on a topic that's critically important to you, consider getting help from a
medical librarian through the Medical Library Association's website. The National Library of Medicine, part of the National Institutes
of Health, offers advice on surfing for health news.
Talk to your doctor. Don't take what you find on the Internet as gospel - it may be unnecessarily scary, oversimplified or just
plain wrong. And don't self-prescribe based on online revelations. Your doctor can put information you find in context.

Most commonly, these online researchers want to learn about a specific condition that affects them or a loved one, about anything
from ways to soothe the effects of poison ivy to how recognize stroke symptoms. In some cases, a patient or relative might “go to
school on that topic and become enough of an expert to navigate New England Journal of Medicine abstracts,” says Susannah Fox,
author of the Pew study.

A big challenge of Web research is dealing with the sheer volume of information—and its wildly uneven quality. Pew’s study shows
that most “e-patients” start with search engines like Google or Yahoo, which toss up thousands of websites, ranked according to
the appearance of key words. If you google “controlling asthma,” for example, you’ll get the website of the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration, as well as one called mamashealth.com, whose contact information is a link labeled “e-mail Mama,” with no
indication of who “Mama” is.