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Key Points
Health information is increasingly available on the Internet and “pushed” through portals.
Internet medical information may be presented with hidden biases or be inaccurate.
Until standards are developed, the principle of caveat emptor (buyer beware) is best followed.
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Whereas patients may once have thought of medical knowledge as the sole province of its priests and priestesses—doctors and nurses, the advent of the Internet and ready access to medical information has radically changed things. Every news magazine has run a story on patients or parents who have exhaustively searched the Internet for obscure medical information. All of the major news portals now have a section dedicated to health stories and, as a result, more health information is available to patients than ever before.
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Every office-based practitioner has dealt with new patients who arrive with a fistful of information pertaining to their medical problem. Patients are increasingly well informed or at least attempt to be so, and they have the vast resources of the Internet at their disposal (Fig. 13-1). There is much to be said for having more well-informed patients, but it has become clear that much of the medical information on the Internet is placed there for some form of secondary gain.
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Clinicians have also come to rely on the Internet for medical information, and while they may be more savvy or skeptical consumers, they are subject to the same biases and inaccuracies as patients in some of the information they find. There are growing efforts by the government and professional organizations to create certifications or “seals of approval” indicating that the content on a health information site is accurate and current (Fig. 13-2).
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INTERNET USAGE BY PATIENTS
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Key Points
One of the key uses of the Internet is to search for medical information.
While there are medical search engines, medical content is largely presented “as is.”
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There are an estimated 20,000 or more websites on the Internet dedicated to every kind of health information. Some studies have shown that between 50 and 80% of adults with Internet access use it for medical purposes; in fact, a recent Harris survey estimated that 97 million adults have used the Internet to look for health-related materials. More than 70% of the people who look for medical information on the Web use it to assist in their medical decision-making. Patients search for drug and disease information as well as providers. The Internet has already had a significant effect on the practice of medicine and ...