Warning Regarding Health Information
It is very important to be careful when using information accessed on the Web.An article entitled "Reliability of Health Information for the Public on the World Wide Web: Systematic Survey of Advice on Managing Fever in Children at Home" in the British Medical Journal reported that of forty-one sites accessed, only four adhered closely to published pediatric guidelines for managing children's fevers (from the abstract and author's abstract). Details are provided in the article. Therefore, parents who use Web sites for information about coping with a child's fever may be greatly misled. (Impicciatore, Piero, Nichola Casella, and Maurizio Bonati. 28 June 1997: 1875+. Includes footnotes.)
In addition, the article concludes that it might be useful "to evaluate the quality and accuracy of more traditional sources of advice for parents (childcare books and pamphlets, etc), which would probably be no better than those of the web pages." Thus, accuracy or lack thereof is an important consideration when Evaluating Books and Evaluating Articles, as well as Evaluating Web pages. The article warns that "advice obtained through the world wide web should not be a substitute for routine care by a family doctor."
Scholarly articles published in 2005 reiterate the need for careful consideration when accessing Web sites for health care information. The Health on the Net Foundation (HON) has established a Web "code of conduct" or principles to which they recommend medical Web sites adhere. The code is available in over thirty languages. Another measure, established in the European Union, is the eEurope 2002: Quality Criteria for Health related Websites; it is available in eleven languages here (scroll down and click on PDF of preferred language; in English, page 7 lists the quality criteria). See "Can We Trust Cancer Information on the Internet?--A Comparison of Interactive Cancer Risk Sites" (Cancer Causes and Control 16 (2005): 765-72), for an analysis of Web sites for assessing specific cancer risks; overall the sites viewed were considered to be unreliable. Only two sites were considered to be close to fulfilling the eEurope criteria.
Note: articles in mainstream media may also be suspect. Articles written for lay people were evaluated using a modified CONSORT guideline (the CONSORT statement is used by some of the most prestigious medical journals, "to help improve the quality of reports of randomized controlled trials"). A pilot project found that "media articles do an incomplete job in communicating essential information about clinical trials . . .." (See Susannah E. Motl, Erin M. Timpe, and Samantha F. Eichner. "Evaluation of Accuracy of Health Studies Reported in Mass Media." Journal of the American Pharmacists Association 45 (2005): 720-5, for details.)