More than half of adult Americans used the internet to look up healthcare information in the last year, according to a CDC study conducted in the first six months of last year.
The study does not address a critical question of how much of the information that people found was accurate?
People also use the internet more frequently to get doctors to fill prescriptions and to make appointments with their physicians. “During the first 6 months of 2009, 6% of adults aged 18-64 requested a refill of a prescription on the Internet, and almost 3% had made an appointment with a health care provider in the past 12 months using the Internet.” The study is based on a poll of 7,192 people between the ages of 18 and 64 which was done between January and June 2009.
There are real dangers in the move toward the use of the internet to get information about health and medical issues and to interact with doctors. The first is that once requests for medical treatment are online, the ability to keep health and disease data private is compromised. E-mail in particular is notoriously insecure.
The other problem with the internet as a source for health information is that data on the web can be inaccurate and even maliciously misleading Services like WebMD are managed by professionals, but Google searches on health issues can bring the consumer a number of bogus sites run by amateurs and quacks. It is hard for people without backgrounds in medicine to separate the information wheat from the chaff
Douglas A. McIntyre
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