5 Simple Search Strategies to Find Quality Health Information on the Internet

Approximately 10 million people in the U.S. online search for information about health or the health of their loved ones every day. 140 million Americans have already undertaken such a search. A number of recent studies have examined this activity, three factors stand out:

1 Search the Internet for health information is an extremely common operation in America
2nd While many people find the health information that seems helpful, most do not really know if it is reliable.
3rd People trust doctors to provide quality health information and information from the internet talking with doctors, who are "health information specialists" often leads to changes in treatment.

So, what are the 5 search strategies?

1 Quick and dirty.

for a quick simple search there is nothing wrong with doing a quick search on Google or Yahoo and at least scan the first 20 or so results. Just remember that Google displays two types of results, web pages ranked by commercial secret algorithmically derived measure of popularity, which is what most people look at first, and sponsored paid links. second quick and dirty approach is taken routinely go for a couple of quality information pages as their first stop outside of search engines. I recommend wikipedia amazing open source encyclopedia with great breadth and depth, but still with a level of inaccuracy, and the MedlinePlus site of the Government and running it, in my opinion, the best overall health of the consumer sites on the Internet.

Many patients want to go beyond that level of search, however, and I would suggest the following strategy:

2 journal search

There are several free programs on the Internet that allow you to search for a professional peer-reviewed scientific articles on health and medical journals. Two major professional databases are: "Medline" the NIH "Psycinfo" at the American Psychological Association

3 Search rate Internet subject gateways

the beauty of Internet searches is that you can pick up useful reliable information that is not always published in peer-reviewed journals, but it has been checked for accuracy teams of medical reviewers. Gateways can be used by the U.S. National Library of Medicine Healthfinder or in the United States, or NHSDirect Intute and the UK. Other sites are dedicated to the collection of peer-reviewed "best practices" treatment guidelines (guideline.gov) that you can use to compare with their treatment regime. If you want information about evidence-based medicine can not pass the Cochrane Library (cochrane.org) and I often recommend eMedicine (eMedicine.com), which is emerging as a "Simple health ".

4 general web searches

Now we move to open areas on the Internet that you find through search engines. Here you will have to start examining the quality of information that is critical to take a lot more like most of it will not be subjected to any real quality review mechanism, and many will have a commercial bias. Use Discern.org.uk methods for assessing the quality of information on common places, and, in general, tend to focus on mainstream sites that link government agencies or universities.

5 discussion lists and newsgroups

This is where you can waste the most time, and where is the least reliable information - but it can be fun and sometimes useful, especially if you want to communicate with others with similar needs. You May even be happy to join a group where the real experts. There are many groups on the Internet - just put in the search string groups of words, and regardless of the topic you are researching. The largest number of health care they currently seem to be on Google Groups

Once you have undertaken to search the most important next step is to discuss his findings with you doctor. The role of many doctors in a gradual change, and they are becoming more and more "information analysts" helping patients find quality information on health which will lead to good health care decisions. More details are available in my book.