If you've ever been daring enough to admit to your doctor that your medical knowledge comes from the "internet," you know the look you get. There's a scowl, a head shake and an implied tsk tsk as he leans back to get a better look at this pretender sitting across from him. "Don't do that," he says. "You can't rely on the information being true or current." The problem is that he is mostly right.
For every credentialled article, say something published by the NIH or the FDA, a Google search will turn up a 'paper ' written by a self-proclaimed expert. Sticking to references from legitimate medical or educational sources with domain names that end in .edu or .gov is a good start. Although not everyone trusts the .gov resource in all matters.
If I come upon a web-based article with intriguing but unverified information, I'll shift the focus of my search to see if there's a lot of other people out there espousing similar opinions. If the lone wolf doesn't have supporters, it doesn't mean he's wrong, just not repeatable at this time. The other night I found several web articles about the use of surgical robotics for shoulder replacement surgery. The problems with repeating it, for me, were that all the articles I found referenced one company developing the equipment and I couldn't find anything more recent that 2006 or 2007. I hope someone is working on the idea but I'll have to pass up writing about it for now. Then, there is "computer assisted" shoulder replacement surgery which sounds like more of the same but really has to do with planning the surgery, analyzing the X-rays and cat scans to custom fit the artificial shoulder parts and is in common use already.
I have had my doctor tell me that Internet information is not current, therefore not necessarily true. He's right. There are many negative articles on the web about reverse total shoulder surgery and many of them reflect the opinions prevalent when rTSA came to the U.S.in 2004 or 2005. Reading the same critiques in 2010 or 2011 give a totally different outlook. It's not easy to find dates on many of the articles. Sometimes the only way to guess when it was written is by scanning the bibliography at the end where, in keeping with good term paper etiquette, the date is part of the reference. So you can merely infer the article was written later than the posted reference. The biggest problem is that current data is not usually accessible to the lay researcher. We cannot log into many of the private membership only sites that publish the latest medical research. One needs a medical license and speciality affiliation. Journals are similarly restricted and may require a subscription.
I look at a site like Wikipedia as a bastion of erudition but the fact is Wikipedia is a collaborative project written by many experts and unknown numbers of self professed experts. It is policed by people who, hopefully, know more about the subject than those of us who run to it like we did the Encyclopedia Britanica purchased by our parents from a door to door salesman.
Prevention Magazine has five suggestions for searching the web for medical information:
Narrow down your results. Be specific.
Look for consistency in the articles that you rely on.
Consider the source; the author or the institution.
Check the date of the article.
Stay connected, keep looking. Don't stop with one article that supports your position.
Listen to your doctor but don't give up on the web. Just take it all with a grain of salt and consider the source! Be especially suspicious of writers like me!
http://youtu.be/5IBeYILiUj0
Archive timeline: 2014: May and June - preparing for surgery, July - surgery and post op problems, August - recovery and physical therapy, September - thinking medically.
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