50% Doctors Use Wikipedia For Health Info

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50% Doctors Use Wikipedia For Health Info

IF YOU regularly turn to a search engine to find out whether, say, you should put ice on a twisted ankle, you're far from alone. Sixty-one per cent of American adults seek out health advice online, according to a survey published last month by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Around a third of those surveyed admitted they changed their thinking about how they should treat a condition based on what they found online. Yet a growing body of evidence suggests that much online health information is unreliable.

"My overall impression is that the quality of health information varies wildly, almost ridiculously wildly," said Kevin Clauson, a pharmacologist at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. "If [a website] is treated as an authoritative source, and there's evidence that it isn't, then it's potentially dangerous." Several studies to be published in medical journals this year highlight the issue. Pia López-Jornet and Fabio Camacho-Alonso of the University of Murcia, Spain, found that information on oral cancers on the top websites gathered by Google and Yahoo searches was "poor" (Oral Oncology, DOI: 10.1016/j.oraloncology.2009.03.017). Among other things, the websites failed to attribute authorship, cite sources and report conflicts of interest. And a study by a team at the Charité University Medical Centre in Berlin, Germany, of googled advice on how to deal with heartburn found that "the evidence for most of the recommendations is weak to nonexistent" (European Journal of Integrative Medicine, DOI: 10.1016/j.eujim.2009.05.001).

While these and other studies examined dozens of websites, most agree that the site to watch is Wikipedia. Popular and easy to browse, the user-generated encyclopedia is the eighth most visited site on the internet, and the first stop for many seeking health information. Wikipedia articles appear in the top 10 results for more than 70 per cent of medical queries in four different search engines, according to a study in this month's Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (DOI: 10.1197/jamia.M3059). It also gets more hits than corresponding pages on the US National Library of Medicine's MedlinePlus service.

This is worrying, and perhaps an indicator that some people's search engine strategies may not be up to scratch. A 2002 study found that most searchers use only one term in their searches and rarely look past the first page of results - though internet users may have improved the way they search since then (BMJ, vol 324, p 573). More disconcerting is the percentage of doctors who turn to Wikipedia for medical information: 50 per cent, according to a report in April by US healthcare consultancy Manhattan Research.

How does Wikipedia fare as a medical reference? Its collaborative, user-generated philosophy generally means that errors are caught and corrected quickly. Several studies, including one examining health information, another probing articles on surgery, and one focusing on drugs, found the online encyclopedia to be almost entirely free of factual errors. Better still, the articles improve significantly with time, according to a study Clauson published last December in the The Annals of Pharmacotherapy (vol 42, p 1814). "Wikipedia's editing policy does work," he says. But any Wikipedia page (beyond those locked to prevent vandalism) is vulnerable to malicious editing - and some drug firms have been caught removing negative information on their drugs from Wikipedia pages.

The site's other major flaw is its incompleteness. Wikipedia was able to answer only 40 per cent of the drug questions Clauson asked of it. By contrast, the traditionally edited Medscape Drug Reference answered 82 per cent of questions. "If there is missing safety information about a drug, that can be really detrimental," Clauson points out. For example, Wikipedia's

page on the HIV drug Prezista

page on the HIV drug Prezista

makes no mention of complications when used alongside St John's wort, the herbal supplement used to treat depression. Their potent interaction can cause the HIV therapy to fail. On the other hand, the publicity Clauson's research garnered has helped fix the shortcomings he highlighted. One error of omission - that pregnant women should avoid the painkiller Arthrotec - was fixed the same day Fox News ran a story on the study.

The medical community has taken note of Wikipedia's success, and has made several attempts to replicate it. For instance, specialty-specific wikis (editable web pages) such as RadiologyWiki and WikiSurgery can be edited only by doctors. A more general medical wiki called Medpedia, also written and vetted by medical professionals, launched in February. Medpedia was founded by San Francisco entrepreneur James Currier, who teamed up with several prominent medical schools and organisations to build a reliable medical database - with a social networking site at its heart. It includes non-encyclopedic resources such as a section for user Q&As and debates.

"Our goal is to be the place where physicians tell their patients to go educate themselves," Currier told New Scientist. "Everyone can benefit from a more educated patient." But it's still always a good move to consult a professional before starting a treatment, he cautions. "Anything they see [on Medpedia] will be trustworthy stuff, but it's not complete. Nobody is," he says. It will take a long time for these smaller wikis to match the popularity of Wikipedia, however. "Ultimately, it will be easier to change the quality of information in Wikipedia than to change the search habits of an entire population," Clauson says.

The US National Institutes of Health is catching on. On 16 July, it hosted an event at its headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland, with the stated aim of teaching health professionals how to edit Wikipedia's health pages and why they should think about doing so. The Wikipedia of the future, it seems, looks set to become a far more reputable place.


Source: Should you trust health advice from the web? - tech - 29 July 2009 - New Scientist

[ManISinJpr]

That is so worrisome and bad, they should look up webmd.com or such sites but wikipedia. man it gives me shivers when I think about that.

[sohail99]

As a fact! all the essential medical knowledge, especially the in-depth knowledge of a subject like Medicine, Surgery, Paediatrics, Gynae cannot be acquired from internet!

Internet only has superficial knowledge of these subjects which are meant for understanding of a common man!
I've tried consulting the net for my surgery seminar on Peripheral vascular diseases! but only worthy thing I found were photos(Angiography pictures, X-rays etc.)

A proper medical library can never be formed on the net unfortunately!
I had to sit hours in my college library going through a large no of books to get info!

imo! internet should only be used to confirm what you have studied in the books!(+ for curious patients who want to understand whats going on with them)
just like an X-ray should only be done to support the doctor's diagnosis.

[iwanowsky]

its a sad news one.. but in india especially in southern side.. most senior doctors only believe books and their experience only as far as my knowledege..

[BLuEBLOODED]

^^Exactly, most of them do...This trend is upsetting though...

[MaxAxe]

Modern medicine is a hit and try science anyway ... we are all guinea pigs at the hands of doctors. Doctors mostly cure symptoms ... and very seldom they cure illnesses.

[BLuEBLOODED]

Originally Posted by MaxAxe Modern medicine is a hit and try science anyway ... we are all guinea pigs at the hands of doctors. Doctors mostly cure symptoms ... and very seldom they cure illnesses.

True.

The General Practitioner is excused, but what if Super-specialists are of the same breed?? My bad, super specialists are super brainy too...

[iwanowsky]

Originally Posted by MaxAxe Modern medicine is a hit and try science anyway ... we are all guinea pigs at the hands of doctors. Doctors mostly cure symptoms ... and very seldom they cure illnesses.

ur correct --> few of the physician i saw in my practical life treat the disease symptomatically but not taking action in treating the disease....
and in rural area peoples itself wanted them to treat symptomatically..

[Techie#1]

Originally Posted by MaxAxe Modern medicine is a hit and try science anyway ... we are all guinea pigs at the hands of doctors. Doctors mostly cure symptoms ... and very seldom they cure illnesses.

So Very TruE!!!

[sohail99]

Symptoms generally point to an illness!

a disease manifests itself through symptoms!
So if the symptoms are taken care of(as in a systematic approach) the disease can be cured!

and btw as the patient comes with complaints like pain, headache etc. our first priority is to relieve him of the pain!
side by side, depending on the symptoms presented we do make differential diagnosis to find out the root cause of the patients present condition.

[ronnie_gogs]

@Antidote :
hey doc
Do u use wiki for health info

[MaxAxe]

Sohail ... the keyword is seldom ... I dont mean to say that the docs dont cure cancer or heart ailments and things like that ... when it comes to things that they cant properly diagnose ... (including stuff like viral fever and respiratory diseases).... thats when the guessing game begins

[sohail99]

I agree completely!
after all every person is different and so every doctor treats a patient 'his way'!!

[BLuEBLOODED]

Originally Posted by sohail99 I agree completely! after all every person is different and so every doctor should treat a patient 'his way'!!

Fixed.

[sierrafox]

it has to be viewed in the correct way. There have been many cases where doctors when confounded with a unique or rare case have often turned to online resources in their quest for a cure or a treatment. Why? Not because they have no idea what they're doing, but simply because of the wealth of information that is freely contributed to sites by other fellow practicioners in a manner just as we all do on our forums.

Dont look at it necessarily as wiki. wiki too has a wealth of information for lay men, but for many professionals it is also a great source to check if theres some content that has been made refernce of which they might have overlooked.

A classic case in point is that of Jeanna Giese, the ONLY known survivor of rabies. To her good fortune, her doctor made a frantic search for medical references on rabies both online and offline and having come across numerous case references and old research, he realised that rabies didnt kill the body or damage it itself, it simply caused the brain to "short circuit" thereby killing the victim.by their brain activity. Thus he accurately guessed that if he could somehow shut down the brain long enough for the body to fight the virus, the girl could be given a chance to survive. And it worked.

Having studied a lot of biochem and science, i can tell you for sure that you cannot react to this report in a one track view. Obviously medical professionals do know what they need to know to be medical professionals, yet i know that a lot of them simply broaden their horizons and understanding of their specialisation simply by reading and referring to a lot of online resources. Wiki by its popularity and open contribution nature, just happens to be the 1st stop in their search online.