Saturday, March 15, 2008
A Good (Medical) Use for the Internet
Montana State University is recruiting rural women for a study on chronic health conditions, and it appears that learning how to use the Internet is part of the study. I definitely agree with the previous post that the 'net can be fuel for hypochondriacs, but this study sounds like a great idea. A key difference here may be teaching the women how to find and evaluate pertinent medical information, and the obvious benefits of connecting people who are physically isolated from each other (and large populations in general).
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This study must be investigating what health benefits internet interaction has on these women's healthy. The women involved in the experimental group will dip into a shared knowledge among patients that a doctor may not even know. For example, a particular treatment may not be well followed by patients because it causes discomfort, or strange pain, etc. Sometimes chronic and rare diseases have symptoms/properties only those who are experiencing them directly know about.
This connects back to the article posted earlier about the brain scientist who experienced a stroke. She finally experienced first hand what her patients went through and gained access to a shared knowledge that only patients hold.
I think this study explores the benefits of the internet as a medical research tool very well. The other positive thing about this study is that it teaches the women in group 1 how to effectively use the internet. Maybe this type of educational program could lessen those hypochondriac tendencies fueled by internet sites. I'm curious to see how the women in group 1 and group 2 responded to the different information they received from different sources. If this data was widely publicized, could this have a further effect on the medical use of the internet? From studies like this, is it possible to eventually reach a system of solely credible websites rather than a mix of phony sites that make the internet a questionable source for accurate information?
I believe that this study hints at the important topic of how the internet can be used to increase the public's health literacy. There are many people in isolated rural areas who might not have access to the same amount or quality of information that those in more populated areas do. The internet promises to be a very useful tool for confronting this problem. It would probably be able to serve the public even better if we could develop some sort of evaluation criteria for websites. Ideally this criteria would help an individual to determine the quality and reliability of the information on a given site that provides health information.
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