Using the Internet for finding reliable Health Information

I admit it -- I’ve used the internet to research health information. I’ve looked up possible causes of strange rashes, bug bites and chronic coughs. My motives are usually driven by my laziness to call the family doctor. I decided to read a journal paper on how the youth of today use the internet for this purpose and was surprised to find the following information in the first paragraph:

Of 15- to 24-year-olds who have ever gone online, for instance, 75% have used the Internet to lookup health information -- more than the percent of young people who report playing online games (72%), downloading music (72%), participating in chats (67%), shopping online (50%), or checking sports scores (46%). (Buhi, 2009)

Wow. This is a shocking statistic to me. I have to say about 90% of my time online can be devoted to online games. That probably speaks volumes to my health, but I’ll leave that for another blog post. With this statistic in hand, the first question that comes to mind -- is where are young people going to find health information and what are they searching for? The journal article states that most young people use the internet to research sexual health related questions (76.5%).

This article is interesting on a few levels. One, it attempts to improve on previous research in the area by discussing why previous studies have fell short. Two, it demonstrates a modern approach to monitoring, recording and tracking internet usage as part of this study. A good portion of this article discusses how they used a popular desktop recording package (Camtasia Studio) to record internet usage while conducting the study. I’ve personally used this software and can say it’s very useful. Lastly, the journal has loads of statistics as a result of the study.

I was shocked that most young people relied on Wikipedia to answer health questions. This seems like a dangerous decision. Wikipedia has a bad reputation because of its chances of containing false info. Another interesting tidbit is that most individuals rarely went past the first 3 results in a Google search to find information they felt reliably answered their query. In fact, Google was used 94% of the time!

If you’re at all interested in how internet usage studies are performed or how health information is discovered on the web, I highly recommend the read. I’ll end this with a great, albeit worrisome quote:

Wikipedia, my, like final source if I ever wanna find something. (Unknown, 2009)

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Works Cited

Buhi, E. D. (2009). An Observational Study of How Young People Search for Online Sexual Health Information. Journal of American College Health, 58(2), 101-111. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier database.