Tips for savvy medical Web surfing via CNN

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Tips for savvy medical Web surfing

Empowered Patient, a regular feature
from CNN Medical News correspondent Elizabeth Cohen, helps put you in the
driver’s seat when it comes to health care.

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) — When Mary
Ryan’s 4-year-old nephew, Nick, landed in the hospital with a serious infection,
her brother called her in a panic. Ryan isn’t a doctor. She’s not a nurse. She’s
a librarian.

Nick had cat scratch fever, and for weeks it was impervious
to antibiotics. Desperate, the doctor in Nick’s small town wanted to use a more
powerful antibiotic that might save him — but also might make Nick deaf.

Ryan’s brother hoped she could find something — anything —
that would save his son without disabling him. Ryan asked one of her colleagues,
a research specialist at the Texas Medical Center Library in Houston, to search
the medical literature. She came up with an article about an antibiotic that
worked against cat scratch fever but wasn’t toxic.

“We sent the doctor the whole article, and when he read it,
he said, ‘This is great. I hadn’t thought of that,’ ” said Ryan, the
president-elect of the Medical Library Association. Nick took the antibiotic and
recovered without complications.

So if you’re trying to find medical information for yourself
or someone you love, and you’re not lucky enough to have access to a
professional research librarian, what do you do?

“The Empowered Patient” assumes you already know the basics
of good Internet searching: .gov and .edu sites are to be trusted, as are sites
for major health centers (think MayoClinic.com) and health organizations (such as the
American Cancer Society’s cancer.org).

“But there’s so much more you can do. You can take this to a
whole new level,” says Jan Guthrie, director of The Health Resource, a for-pay
medical research service.

So for the Internet searcher hungry for more, here are some
tips for being a sophisticated surfer:

1. Use search engines that screen out
the garbage for you

There’s a lot of junk on the Internet. “It’s the wild, wild
West out there,” says Alan Spielman, CEO of URAC, a company that certifies
health Web sites. “You really have to be alert as you go through these
sites.”

To get rid of the junk, use a search engine that looks only
at reputable sites that have been vetted by health professionals. Dirline, run
by the National Library of Medicine, is one such engine, as are medlineplus.gov
and Imedix.com.
Healthfinder.gov searches for information on government
health Web sites.

2. Find smart bloggers with your
disease

Some bloggers do an excellent job of linking to resources
specific to your disease. That goes for advocacy groups, too.

3. Invest 30 minutes in the pubmed.gov
tutorial

Pubmed.gov searches the medical literature, but
it isn’t completely intuitive. It’s worth the time to learn how to use it by
doing the tutorial.

Nervous you won’t understand the technical jargon in medical
articles? Don’t be, says Guthrie. She advises reading the very beginning of a
study and the very end. “The conclusion will tell you whether the treatment they
studied was effective, moderately effective, or not at all effective.”

In addition, the Medical Library Association, has brochures
called Deciphering Medspeak to help translate some of the more
common medical jargon.

Tara Parker-Pope, a health columnist for the New York
Times, found it useful to specifically search for review articles on pubmed when
she was looking for treatments for her mother’s esophageal cancer. Review
articles give an overview of the latest research on a particular subject.
“Review articles are an excellent way to get a lay of the land and to get the
big picture on a topic,” Parker-Pope says.

To find review articles on pubmed, go to the “limits” tab
and then under “type of article”, check “review.”

4. Click on information about annual
meetings

For example, let’s say you just got a breast cancer
diagnosis. You could go to asco.org, the site for the American Society of Clinical
Oncology, and look at information on new breast cancer treatments discussed at
last year’s meeting.

This is the way to get cutting-edge information, Guthrie
says. “Information on new treatments is presented at conferences six to 12
months before it’s published in a medical journal.”

Guthrie says she managed to find out about a new treatment
for tendonitis this way. “It wasn’t even in the medical journals yet. We found
one doctor in New York who was doing it. If I had tendonitis, it might’ve been
worth traveling to him,” she says.

5. When in doubt about a Web site, click
on “about us”

Sometimes it’s clear who runs a Web site. Often it’s not.
Clicking on “about us” should explain it. Knowing who’s behind the information
you’re reading (especially if they’re trying to sell you something) helps you
evaluate whether the information is biased. If you can’t figure out who runs the
site, don’t use it.

And here perhaps are two of the most valuable pieces of
advice: Use Internet resources in combination. “An advocacy group or a review
article by itself is pretty useless,” Parker-Pope says. “No one of these works
by itself.”

The second piece of advice: Don’t expect the Internet to
cure your disease. “I wanted to find the needle in the haystack to cure my
mother,” Parker-Pope says. “But information doesn’t cure cancer. It just leads
you to the best doctor and the best options.”

Parker-Pope never found the needle in the haystack. Her
mother, Karen Parker, died nine months after her diagnosis. But because of what
they found out on the Internet, Parker-Pope and her family had confidence she
received the best possible care. “And feeling confident in your care is no small
thing,” she says.

Article via CNN here.



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