First, MEDLINEplus does not appear very prominently among the search\nresults. Sites with much less funding and institutional support, and<\/p>\n
with much less detailed information, are at least as prominent on the<\/p>\n
Web. Indeed, a Hungarian student who once had mononucleosis and has<\/p>\n
written 700 words on the subject is almost as prominent as MEDLINEplus,<\/p>\n
which is a major product of a federal agency with a $250 million annual<\/p>\n
budget. <\/li>\n
Second, it is difficult to make an accurate diagnosis of mononucleosis\nusing the Internet, because its symptoms vary and resemble the symptoms<\/p>\n
of other diseases (including HIV\/AIDS). There is a fairly reliable blood<\/p>\n
test that only a physician can conduct. Therefore, many people who suspect<\/p>\n
that they have mononucleosis will learn from the Web that they may be<\/p>\n
right, but their diagnosis must be confirmed by a physician. The value<\/p>\n
of using the Internet in this case is somewhat limited.<\/li>\n
Third, you are more likely to find yourself using MEDLINEplus if you\nknow that you are interested in "mononucleosis" (a scientific<\/p>\n
term), rather than if you only know that you have fever, headache, swollen<\/p>\n
glands, tiredness, and malaise (the main symptoms of the disease). If<\/p>\n
you look for symptoms, most of the sites you find with Google will be<\/p>\n
irrelevant or unreliable. <\/li>\n
Fourth, the apparent reliability of prominent sites that describe\nmononucleosis differ widely, but the main information that they offer<\/p>\n
is similar (with the exception of the material on homeopathy that appears<\/p>\n
in some of the non-governmental sites.) Even the 700-word site constructed<\/p>\n
by a Hungarian student offers fundamentally the same message as MEDLINEplus—on<\/p>\n
this particular topic.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet-and-public-issues"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4150\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}