Research your Way to Good Health with the Internet
What Kind of Health Information is on the Internet?
Information on health conditions and diseases
Medical and surgical treatment information
Information about medications and their side-effects
Clinical trial postings
Medical dictionaries
Medical encyclopedias
Herbal remedies and alternative medicine
Medical organization and association web sites
How To Tell the Good from the Bad
Web site evaluation criteria -
Who runs the site?
Who pays for the site?
What is the purpose of the site?
Where does the information come from?
What is the basis of the information?
How is the information selected?
How current is the information?
How does the site choose links to other sites?
What information about you does the site collect, and why?
How does the site manage interactions with visitors?
-”Ten Things to Know about Evaluating Medical Resources on the Web,” National Cancer Institute, http://www.cancer.gov/cancerinfo/ten-things-to-know, viewed 5/7/03.
The Criteria
Who runs the site?
Ex. – MEDLINEplus - http://medlineplus.gov
Header on all MEDLINEplus pages
“A service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health.”
Footer
Links to both organizations are located at the bottom of each page.
The Criteria
2. Who pays for the site?
The URL ends in .gov which indicates that the site is sponsored by the federal government.
Some other kinds of sites:
.com indicates a corporate site, ex. http://www.merck.com
.edu indicates a site affiliated with an educational institution,
ex. http://www.harvard.edu
.org indicates a non-profit organization’s website,
ex. http://www.americanheart.org
The Criteria
What is the purpose of the site?
“MEDLINEplus is designed to help you find appropriate, authoritative health information.”
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/criteria.html
The Criteria
Where does the information come from?
http://medlineplus.gov/
NLM
NIH
ADAM (Encyclopedia)
Merriam-Webster (Dictionary)
News (Reuters)
Various health organizations & their websites
The Criteria
What is the basis of the information?
Varies by link
Research links sections tend to have more evidence based links