It used to be, "Take two aspirins and call me in the morning."
But soon enough, you may hear your doctor say, "Take these pills and check out my webpage."
With over 157 million people using the Internet in the United States and Canada alone, a Duke doctor and an Illinois colleague conducted a study intended to gauge how much patients rely on the web for medical information.
In their findings, published in yesterday's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Assistant Professor of Gastroenterology Barry O'Connor and Dr. John Johanson of Rockford Gastroenterology Associates reported that while one quarter of their outpatients used the web to find medical information in one year, only four percent were ever advised by their physicians to do so. "[The study] demonstrates that more patients are using the web but [it also shows] that doctors are not the drive behind this." O'Connor said.
The study also found that while only 28 percent of the patients said they searched the web, 60 percent indicated that they intended to search the web for health-related information in the future.
This trend, however, is not without dangers. The team pointed out that a large amount of medical information available on the web is provided by commercial organizations instead of professional medical organizations.
"Medical professionals must acknowledge the growing importance of electronic health information by developing their own practice websites, using the web as a patient education tool and helping patients identify good versus poor health information available on the web," the team wrote in JAMA.
The study used a questionnaire distributed to just over 1,000 patients who visited the gastroenteronology clinics at Duke and Rockford. The researchers analyzed the data to glean information about the population surveyed.
"It's a large sample compared to previous studies," O'Connor said. "What's different is that these were people who were looking for care and actually attended the clinic."
O'Connor envisions a health profession where doctors would not only hand out written information but also refer patients to websites previously screened for quality.
He also stressed the benefits of having doctors develop their own personal websites, complete with appropriate links.
Although this is not a novel concept, such approaches are used only sporadically in medical centers across the nation.
O'Connor said he believes this could be attributed to a large combination of factors, including the newness of the Internet and the questionable content of some websites.
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