Searching for Consumer Health Information
A recent post on Medlib-L by Joy Kennedy pointed out a really interesting Curbside Consultation article from American Family Physician (authored, interestingly, by the Editor-in-Chief of DynaMed, Dr. Brian S. Alper) about the growing practice of patients seeking out health information on the web, and even using it to suggest diagnoses to their doctors.
Ideally, patients and physicians work together to determine the best course of action. The Internet provides patients with opportunities to become more self-informed and may help promote this shared decision-making approach. A Health On the Net Foundation survey of Internet users showed that the Internet helped 91 percent of survey participants become better “partners” with their physicians. However, the Internet also may provide patients with advice that is inaccurate, misleading, and counterproductive. Physicians may suggest professional Web sites or offer guidance on information seeking. [Hyperlink inserted in place of footnote]
It is a clear, digestible article that I think raises most of the right questions, but it only scratched the surface of the related issues. If the topic interests you, don’t miss these posts from Dean Giustini on Consumer Health search portals:
- Healia’s Search Vortal – does it have a chance?
- Searchers Heal Thyself – Introducing Healia in beta
- Google health revisited – where’s Google medicine?
- HealthLine, Kosmix, and MammaHealth – Medical Search in the News
- New Health Vortal – Rival to Google or Google Scholar?
- Google Co-Op and Health – Thumbs Down
For any readers who don’t work in medical librarianship:
If you have to choose ONE place to start looking for consumer health information online, make it MedlinePlus. (If any MedLib folks disagree with this advice, I’d be pleased to post any arguments to the contrary.)
Here’s the list I have so far of free consumer health information search portals:
- HealthLine
- Kosmix
- MammaHealth
- Google Health Co-Op
- eMedicine Consumer Health
- Search.com Health and Medicine
- NHS Direct
- WebMD
- MedlinePlus
I must be missing at least a few, right?
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August 20th, 2006 at 10:30 am
[...] (Some consumer information portals are listed here in a previous post on this blog. In his post to MEDLIB-L today, David Dillard points to a list of several more, but I note that a number of these really aren’t geared towards consumer use. Regardless, there are a ton of interesting resources listed here that I’ll be combing through.) [...]