BMJ 2002;324:557-558 ( 9 March )

Editorials

The quality of health information on the internet

As for any other medium it varies widely; regulation is not the answer

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

This week's theme issue attempts to provide a framework for thinking about the quality of health information on the internet---a source of anxiety almost since its first appearance.

Five years ago Impicciatore and colleagues reviewed website advice on managing fever in children and concluded that it varied widely in terms of accuracy, completeness, and consistency.1 Pick any medical problem today, and the chances are you'll find the same. With at least 80 studies reporting similar findings (G Eysenbach, personal communication), we need no more convincing that the quality of information on the web varies as widely as it does in other media.

In 1997 Gagliardi and Jadad identified 47 instruments for measuring healthcare quality on the internet. Four years later, they found another 51---all of them unvalidated (p 569).2 Generating yet more unproved instruments looks like another activity that researchers could usefully stop. However, the proliferation of tools for assessing quality . . . [Full text of this article]
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Rapid Responses:

Read all Rapid Responses

A significant number of users are confused by medical information provided over the internet.
Chinmay M Gupte, et al.
bmj.com, 11 Mar 2002 [Full text]
Useful health info!
David A Robinson
bmj.com, 12 Mar 2002 [Full text]
Anxiety about quality and accuracy of medical information on the Internet will go down in the future
Cándido Hernández-López
bmj.com, 14 Mar 2002 [Full text]
Samuel Johnson on regulating the internet
Richard Smith
bmj.com, 15 Mar 2002 [Full text]
Available antidotes not exhibited, bureacracy not an answer
Adrian K Midgley
bmj.com, 17 Mar 2002 [Full text]
Acceptance of websites as references by peer reviewed journals.
Nicholas White, et al.
bmj.com, 19 Mar 2002 [Full text]
What makes health information on the internet different?
s Vinod
bmj.com, 28 Jun 2002 [Full text]
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