Cyberchondriacs may be getting bad advice
Two stories out this week might make you think twice before you Google your latest strange symptom. Researchers at Microsoft looked into various health search terms that people used on search engines, hoping to develop a tool that would make their search engine a better advisor to people.
Web gives searchers medical schoolitis
The company found that when people search for diagnoses for their symptoms, they’re often led to the worst-case scenario rather than less dangerous and more plausible reasons for what ails them. Searching for a basic symptom was just as likely to bring back pages suggesting a dire reason for the problem as they were to bring back results about more benign reasons for a symptom.
For example searching for headaches will get you about as many pages linking headaches to brain tumors as saying headaches can be caused by caffeine withdrawal, even though brain tumors are very rare.
The study found that about 2 percent of all web searches are health related, and about a quarter of web searchers studies engaged in at least one health-related search during the study period. Of those, about a third went on to search for more information about a serious illness they might have convinced themselves was a possible explanation for their symptoms.
And more than half of 500 Microsoft employees who answered a survey about their searching habits said finding information about a scary disease had disrupted their normal activities at least once.
Relying on Wiki can lead to danger
Web searches about medical conditions and possible treatments often lead people to Wikipedia, that treasure-trove of user-generated content. But when it comes to medical advice, the website is often lacking, according to research from Nova Southeastern University in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.
Researchers looked at the pages for 80 different drugs, and while they didn’t find a lot of factual errors on the site, there were many potentially dangerous omissions. For example, the page on the anti-inflammatory drug Arthrotec failed to mention it can cause miscarriages, and the HIV drug Prezista shouldn’t be taken with St. John’s Wort, since the herb can make the drug less effective, but that wasn’t mentioned, either.
Clearly most people aren’t getting prescriptions without talking to a doctor, but using Wikipedia for research and failing to tell your doctor all the other medications and herbs you’re taking could result in bigger problems than the ones you started with.
Researchers compared Wikipedia to Medscape Drug Reference, a free, peer-reviewed site, looking to find answers to 80 drug-related questions. Medscape could answer 82 percent of the questions, while Wikipedia only managed 40 percent. There were 48 errors of omission on the Wikipedia pages, compared to 14 on Medscape.
(By Sarah E. White for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
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