Comments on: Searching for Health Information Online Dangerous

By: mkuzio (Maryanne Kuzio)

mkuzio (Maryanne Kuzio) — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 13:47:46 +0000

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Searching for Health Information Online Dangerous [link to post] #ahs #canhealthnews

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By: Medpedia: Reliable Crowdsourcing of Health and Medical Information | Highlight HEALTH

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 05:09:01 +0000

[...] don’t consistently check the source and date of the health reference they find [2]. Indeed, searching for health information online is dangerous and finding credible, up-to-date sources of health information can be a [...]

By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 18:06:42 +0000

One of the problems is that as with many things, it all comes down to money. People want to make money online with websites, and many webmasters will just throw content together on a site for the sole purpose of getting high rankings for competitive search terms. If they can get listed on the first page of search engines, then they will get traffic which is all they want.

By: James Bashkin

James Bashkin — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 16:24:23 +0000

Hi Walter:

I think that the effectiveness of pharmaceutical management is very significant, and draw this conclusion from anecdotal evidence and what I presume to be market studies that inspire pharma companies to advertise to aggressively. People may joke about the fine print in TV ads, but when they go to their doctors, they want the pills. If ads were ineffective, there would be no great reason to oversee them and punish companies for overstating the positive sides of their cases, yet the oversight and fines do happen.

However, the other severe damage caused by advertising, in my opinion, results from advertising budgets exceeding research budgets. This has been going on for many years at some companies. Given how difficult research and development has become in the medical area, they money should be going to research alone IMHO.

By: Walter

Walter — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 03:21:41 +0000

Thanks for the link Bill.

Hi Jim: I have to wonder how much damage is really done by pharmaceutical advertising. Isn’t it a standing joke with many people today regarding pharmaceutical ads and the possible side effects? Aren’t many of the conditions for advertised medications perceived as diseases created by the pharmaceutical industry? I’d be interested to see if there was a study done that evaluated the influence and effectiveness of pharmaceutical advertising. IMO, the greatest problem it presents is the impression that everything can be cured with a pill. I advocate health consumer education (hence this blog) and believe doctors should always be influenced by scientific evidence, not financial reward.

Thanks for you comment Emmy!

By: Emmy

Emmy — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:19:54 +0000

You are right. Readers need to figure out the credibility of the health information on the internet by themselves. In some cases, those resources can only be references.

By: James Bashkin

James Bashkin — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 06:26:56 +0000

Great post, as always. I think that a related topic is the damage done by pharmaceutical advertising, though I’d be interested in your thoughts. I believe that pharmaceutical advertising produces large numbers of people who don’t know enough to be more than dangerous, and it often seems difficult for physicians to deny certain medications to their patients when the patients demand them. The other dark side of this equation is the huge amount of money spent by drug companies on this advertising. It is always wise to be an educated consumer, and it doesn’t make sense to treat individual doctors as infallible, but interpreting the medical world with one or more trained experts, and without Madison Avenue’s contributions, seems (to me) to be the safe way to go. Jim

By: Bill Muller

Bill Muller — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 04:32:16 +0000

Thanks for your reference to findings from the 2006 iProspect Search Engine User Behavior Study. If your readers would like to access all the findings of that study -- or any other iProspect search engine marketing study -- they can feel free to do so with our compliments (don't even have to fill out a form).

By: Terry Reeves

Terry Reeves — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 14:41:13 +0000

Unfortunately, if the financial motive is great enough, low quality medically related websites can and will crowd the top positions of popular web searches for medicine and treatments. The barrage of ads on television make this situation even worse. It is not hard for those who can spam to figure out what the public will be searching for and to provide “doorway” pages that link out to affiliate sites for referral income. Education is not the goal of these sites.

By: Walter

Walter — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 03:39:17 +0000

Hi Dan: great tip, thanks for the information.