In between phone calls on practical issues, I worked on my paper concerning
the reliability of medical information on the Web. As a little experiment,
I tried searching for "mononucleosis" on Google. (MEDLINEplus,
the ambitious federal portal, notes that "mononucleosis" is
one of the most common search terms on its site. Since the disease is
not serious but lacks a cure, some reasonable patients and parents may
want to diagnose it and treat the symptoms on their own.)
I noticed a few things:
- First, MEDLINEplus does not appear very prominently among the search
results. Sites with much less funding and institutional support, and
with much less detailed information, are at least as prominent on the
Web. Indeed, a Hungarian student who once had mononucleosis and has
written 700 words on the subject is almost as prominent as MEDLINEplus,
which is a major product of a federal agency with a $250 million annual
budget.
- Second, it is difficult to make an accurate diagnosis of mononucleosis
using the Internet, because its symptoms vary and resemble the symptoms
of other diseases (including HIV/AIDS). There is a fairly reliable blood
test that only a physician can conduct. Therefore, many people who suspect
that they have mononucleosis will learn from the Web that they may be
right, but their diagnosis must be confirmed by a physician. The value
of using the Internet in this case is somewhat limited.
- Third, you are more likely to find yourself using MEDLINEplus if you
know that you are interested in "mononucleosis" (a scientific
term), rather than if you only know that you have fever, headache, swollen
glands, tiredness, and malaise (the main symptoms of the disease). If
you look for symptoms, most of the sites you find with Google will be
irrelevant or unreliable.
- Fourth, the apparent reliability of prominent sites that describe
mononucleosis differ widely, but the main information that they offer
is similar (with the exception of the material on homeopathy that appears
in some of the non-governmental sites.) Even the 700-word site constructed
by a Hungarian student offers fundamentally the same message as MEDLINEpluson
this particular topic.