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Friday, March 29, 2024

Stop Googling symptoms: Health answers online iffy at best, UF study finds

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Students surfing the Internet for solutions to health-related concerns should be wary about their search results.

“The goal really was to just find out what’s out there,” said Brent Kitchens, the lead author of a new UF study on the quality of health-related Internet sources.

Kitchens and the other researchers conducted the study by looking at an index of terms that consumers interested in health information might search. The list is from Medline Plus, a website provided by the National Institute of Health.

They then typed each of the about 2,000 terms into Google and looked at the quality of the results that came back. They determined the quality of the results by going out to other institutions that evaluate health-care-information quality or website quality.

They found that, on average, more than half of the information that comes back is typically high quality.

“Maybe more interestingly, the quality seems to be different for different types of information,” said Kitchens, also a doctoral candidate at the UF Warrington College of Business Administration.

Terms that deal with things such as cancers, bodily systems, lungs, immune systems and digestive systems came back with higher-than-average quality, while things like substance abuse, nutrition, wellness, personal health, safety issues, and family and social issues came back with lower-quality results.

“That information may be interesting and it might get you started down the path of figuring out something, but seeing a physician is probably the best way to go with those types of things,” Kitchens said.

Natalie Rella, a specialist at GatorWell Health Promotion Services, said she agrees with the findings and thinks it’s important for students to be cautious when searching for health-related topics online.

Students have come to her with false information they found online on topics like pregnancy prevention, Rella said.

“I think it’s always wonderful to have empirical evidence supporting things that we may already know anecdotally, and now we can say a sound study took place that can back it up,” Rella said. “It’s just another thing for students to take in and consider when they are going online to get information at their fingertips — to know that when they are doing this to use caution.”

[A version of this story ran on page 5 on 4/16/2014 under the headline "Stop Googling symptoms: Health answers online iffy at best, UF study finds"]

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