Health Web Sites Are Lacking Good Information, Study Says

That dazed and confused sensation you get from trolling the Internet for medical information has nothing to do with you or your computer--it’s built into the online experience itself, according to the most exhaustive survey to date of online health content.

Searching for information on four conditions--breast cancer, depression, childhood asthma and obesity--researchers found, first of all, that only 20% of the links displayed by popular search engines such as Lycos, Excite and Google on their first pages were actually relevant.

The study was released by the Oakland-based California Healthcare Foundation and conducted by Rand Corp., a think tank based in Santa Monica.

Looking more closely at 25 relevant sites, which included both English-language and Spanish-language locations, investigators discovered several gaps in information. By and large, the sites in English were remarkably accurate. But they were not comprehensive, covering only about 75% of the topics deemed important by experts in the field, such as carefully detailed screening guidelines for breast cancer.

The Spanish-language counterparts did far worse, covering only about half the topics doctors considered important and sometimes mangling the facts badly.

“We were all surprised by the deficiency of good information on the Web in Spanish,” says Dr. Gretchen Berland, the study’s lead author. “Even the best Spanish-language sites were not as good as the worst sites in English.”