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Tutorial 2—It's Your HealthDo you have questions about your health or the health of a person you care for? If so, how do you find information that you can trust and that's right for you? Your best source of information is your personal doctor or another licensed healthcare provider. Professionals on your own healthcare team know you, your medical history, and your medications. That being said, carefully selected consumer health information [http://www.healthinfoiowa.org/tutorials/glossary.html#CHI] from the Web may help you:
Goals of this tutorialThe activities in this tutorial have been designed to help you:
As you go through this tutorial, you'll explore other sites on the Web. To return to the training tutorial, click on your browser's back button.
Consumer health informationConsumer health information is "any information that enables individuals to understand their health and make health-related decisions for themselves or their families." (Patrick and Koss, 1995 [http://nii.nist.gov/pubs/chi.html#1.2.5])An important point: consumer health information does not equal patient education. Consumer health information
Patient education
If it seems to good to be true…Have you heard "miracle" claims like these?
What do these claims have in common? They're rip-offs—they all prompted warning letters from the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which watches for health fraud [http://www.healthinfoiowa.org/tutorials/glossary.html#fraud].
Avoiding dangerous "misinformation"Sorting out reliable information from dangerous misinformation is, in some ways, like meeting a person for the first time. Take a close look. Who is presenting the information? Why? Often the who and why will be stated in "about" pages.For example, who is presenting the information you're reading now? To find out, go to "About HealthInfoIowa" [http://www.healthinfoiowa.org/about.html]. You might also want to explore "About Online Health Information" [http://www.healthinfoiowa.org/about/]. "About" pages provide information you can use to evaluate a website, but they're just a start. A number of reputable organizations have developed evaluation tools that you can use to dig deeper:
How do you find a needle in a haystack?Suppose you want to find reliable information about heart attacks. Where would you begin? You could try a generic search engine [http://www.healthinfoiowa.org/tutorials/glossary.html#search].For example, try this search in AltaVista [http://www.altavista.com](Hint: Use a web-savvy technique and put quotation marks around the phrase "heart attack"):
Your search returns over 200,000 pages! Some of these are bound to be good, but do you want to sort through all of this? Sometimes it makes more sense to start your search for information at a more focused, quality-filtered website.
HealthInfoIowa, a resource for online informationHealthInfoIowa [http://www.healthinfoiowa.org] is a quality-filtered website sponsored by the State Library of Iowa [http://www.silo.lib.ia.us]. You can use HealthInfoIowa to find:
Websites listed on the general health resources page have been selected and evaluated by a licensed healthcare professional, using the Health on the Net Code of Conduct for Health and Medical Websites [http://www.hon.ch/HONcode/Conduct.html]. Keep in mind that once you move beyond HealthInfoIowa, you will need to evaluate each new website for reliability. You will also want to check the privacy statement [http://www.healthinfoiowa.org/tutorials/glossary.html#privacy] of each website before you provide any information about yourself or a family member.
MEDLINEplus, a service of the National Library of MedicineMEDLINEplus (http://medlineplus.gov/) is one of the quality-filtered websites featured on the HealthInfoIowa general resources page. MEDLINEplus is easy to use and packed with reliable consumer health information.Try the heart attack search in MEDLINEplus:
MEDLINEplus will search its files and report what it finds on an Advanced Search page. Scroll down the page to look at your options:
Explore the resources available from the Heart Attack page. All of them should provide reliable information in language that makes sense.
Now return to the MEDLINEPlus home page [http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus]. You'll see that it contains a number of useful features:
Interactive health tutorials that explain procedures and conditions in easy-to-read language are available at MEDLINEplus [http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/tutorials.html]. These tutorials require Flash (version 4), a special type of browser software called a plug-in. If your computer does not have this software installed, you will be prompted to obtain a free download of Flash before you start the tutorial. For closer look at these features, take the MEDLINEPlus Tour [http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/tour/tour.html].
Putting information to work for you and your familyIf you have personal health concerns, information found over the Web may be educational. But it cannot substitute for medical advice from a licensed healthcare provider who knows you, your medical history, and your medications. Please consult your personal physician or other healthcare professional for issues related to your own health. For ideas on making good use of information you find, see:
Additional resources
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Copyright © 2001 Iowa Consumer Health Project |
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