Study: Quality of online health information varies
The quality of health information individuals discover from online searches varies significantly depending on what is asked and the results could be hazardous to one’s health, according to a University of Florida (UF) study.
Web searches related to the diagnosis and treatment of physical disease or injuries tend to yield higher-quality information than online searches for preventive health and social health information, according to the study in Decision Support Systems.
UF researchers queried Google’s general search engine using more than 2,000 different health-related terms. Then they looked at the first page of search results to see if they were certified for accuracy by the nonprofit Health on the Net Foundation or were included in Medline Plus, a consumer website run by the National Institutes of Health.
Researchers found, for example, that a search for the word “health” returned highly ranked results from reputable healthcare providers, but a search for “newborn vaccines” yielded hits for blogs and forums that discuss delaying or refusing medically recommended vaccinations.
“Inaccurate or misleading results could lead people to ignore important symptoms and delay or even refuse recommended healthcare,” Brent Kitchens, the study’s lead author and a doctoral candidate at the UF Warrington College of Business Administration’s department of information systems and operations management, said in a release. “Low-quality results could also lead people to seek unnecessary healthcare or implement unproven or potentially harmful at-home treatments.”
Given these findings, the authors suggested that existing online resources should be examined for quality, and that healthcare and government organizations should disseminate more high-quality information on topics where accurate information is lacking.
Read the study here.