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LETTER |
The authors are with the Department of Journalism and Technical Communication, Colorado State University, Fort Collins. Michael D. Slater is also with the Department of Psychology.
Correspondence: Requests for reprints should be sent to Michael D. Slater, PhD, MPA, Department of Journalism and Technical Communication, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523 (e-mail: michael.slater{at}colostate.edu).
We appreciate Melnick’s kind letter regarding our study of Web site listings in response to common health queries, and we appreciate as well the opportunity it affords to elaborate on some of the significant problems and opportunities afforded by the Internet.
Recent surveys indicate that between 40% and 80% of adult American Internet users access health information on the Internet.1,2 The Internet has already influenced the provider–patient relationship, as patients arrive armed with information or misinformation from Internet sources.3 In such clinical contexts, trained medical personnel have the opportunity to help consumers interpret the information they have received. More worrisome, as Melnick suggests, is the prospect of consumer decisions regarding lifestyle, diet, supplements, and treatment being made on the basis of information from problematic Internet sites. For example, we found in a pilot study that even people with graduate-level scientific training may find superficially plausible pseudoscientific health claims persuasive and that the presence or absence of citations for such claims may make little difference.4
The Internet offers the public health community an unprecedented opportunity to cultivate informed and knowledgeable health consumers. The Internet also poses a significant challenge: inaccurate, self-interested, misleading, or outdated information may be as accessible and as superficially credible to lay consumers as is science-based medical knowledge. Finding ways to direct health consumers to credible Internet sources, working to increase consumers’ ability to assess the credibility of health information they do find on the Internet, and striving to make existing credible, objective sources more accessible and appealing to the consumer should be increasingly pressing public health priorities, as reflected in Healthy People 2010 objectives.5
References
1. Fox S, Fallows D. Internet health resources: health searches and email have become more commonplace, but there is room for improvement in searches and overall Internet access. July 16, 2003. Available at: http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=95. Accessed August 26, 2003.
2. Baker L, Wagner TH, Singer S, Bundorf MK. Use of the Internet and e-mail for health care information: results from a national survey [published correction appears in JAMA. 2003;290:334]. JAMA. 2003;289:2400–2406.
3. Helft PR. American oncologists’ view of Internet use by cancer patients: a mail survey of American Society of Clinical Oncology members. J Clin Oncol. 2003;21:942–947.
4. Haard J, Slater MD, Long MA. Pseudo-science and ambiguity of citations in alternative medicine Web sites. Health Commun. In press.
5. US Dept of Health and Human Services. Communicating Health: Priorities and Strategies for Progress. Washington, DC: July 2003.
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