The internet is an increasing source of health education, but a great proportion of this content isn’t based on real medical evidence. In many cases, the content is erroneous because it is poorly researched or incorrectly interpreted by non-experts. In other cases, it is sensationalized to gain readership. Unfortunately, some of it is falsified for financial gain and fame. Consider Australian blogger, Belle Gibson, who was fined the equivalent of 410,000 Australian dollars ($320,000 USD) for public claims that she had cured her own multiple forms of cancer, including terminal brain cancer, just by eating whole foods. It turns out she never had cancer, yet her subsequent book and smartphone app yielded $AU420,000.
Try This Advice from the NIA
The National Institute on Aging (NIA) provides these guidelines (1) for older adults who seek reliable, evidence-based health information:
A good starting place is the National Institutes of Health (NIH) website.
Federal government agencies are another good source, and you can access all of them at www.usa.gov.
MedlinePlus.gov is from the NIH National Library of Medicine. It provides dependable consumer information on more than 1,000 health-related topics.
Check Out the Content of a Medical School
Medical schools and research universities will often have their own websites with evidence-based health information. An example is Stanford’s Center for Health Education (SCHE). I recently had the opportunity to work with SCHE to produce a series of 70 short, evidence-based videos on the most common health conditions in the world today. Check them out!
Have a healthy skepticism about what you read on the internet. If a health claim sounds too good to be true, it most likely isn’t true. Seek out the original studies wherever possible when reading synthesized health information in the public media. — Sally Duplantier