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13 Jul 2009 08:53
to which they recommend medical Web sites adhere. The code is available in over thirty languages. See "Can We Trust Cancer Information on the Internet?--A Comparison of Interactive Cancer Risk Sites" (
Things have not changed much in more recent years. The abstract to "The Impact of Inaccurate Internet Health Information in a Secondary School Learning Environment" (Journal of Medical Internet Research 10.2 (2008): article e17), reports that 22 out of 40 or 55% of links that provided information about vaccines were "inaccurate on the whole." An abstract for a 2009 article, "The Evaluation of Anaesthesia-related Information on the Internet" (Anaesthesia and Intensive Care 37.1 (2009): 79-84) concluded that "quality anaesthesia-related information is unlikely to be retrieved by patients using the internet." An additional aspect of health information found on the Web, mentioned in the abstracts of some recent articles, is that the reading level of many health Web sites is more complex than the average reading level of patients. This, along with the varying accuracy of the information found, is an additional concern for the searcher seeking health guidance on the Web.
URL: http://lib.colostate.edu/howto/warning.html • Modified: 2009-07-08
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