The internet is chock full of information on just about any topic you wish to learn or research. Many people use the internet to self-diagnose or research a medical condition they think they have before heading their physician. Some people start researching after seeing a physician and getting a diagnosis from him/her. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve sat down to start a wellness coaching appointment and clients ask me about something health or medical related that they saw on Dr. Oz (please, do not get me started), read in a magazine or saw in a brief headline online from the FoodBabe (again, please do not get me going). In these instances, my client and I might have a brief discussion about “buyer beware”. It seems to be happening a lot lately, so I felt a need to address it. Here’s my quick and dirty way to check your sources on health and medical websites and articles to see if they are reliable or not.
- Can you get information about who or what organization is posting this information? Do they have an “About Us” section? If not, leave the page now. If so, does it clearly describe the organization, its goal, the various people and professionals involved? If it seems shady, it probably is.
- Who wrote the content? If there is no expert involvement (e.g., actual medical doctors on a medical website), be very careful about believing what you see. If the content wasn’t written by a physician expert in the field (someone board-certified in their specialty area) or a journalist citing published scientific research articles, it might not be accurate.
- Building on the above bullet, beware of citations where the person writing the article is cherry-picking data to support their stance while leaving out the citations to the contrary. Objectivity is key. Only picking out the studies that support a stance is just as bad as not using research citations.
- The website is selling products to help you with that health condition. If you are on a website purporting weight loss strategies that work for everyone and they are selling products to help you with that weight loss, that’s a red flag. That, my friend, is a sales website, not a medical and health website.
- Medical research is updated all of the time. Breaking research is published daily, weekly, monthly, etc. If the site you are going to doesn’t have a date associated with the publication they are citing or the web article is more than a few years old, it might not be indicative of the current state of research.
- Finally, when reading articles about new studies, delve deeper into the study. Were there only 5 subjects in the study or 50, or 500? Was the research conducted by the company selling the product advertised on the webpage?
Just a few things to knock about in your head next time you start researching the latest and greatest signs, symptoms and treatments for some medical condition online. Be savvy and smart about trusting the sources out there.