“Confidence” in Health Searches a Poor Indicator of Finding Good Information
By Josh Seidman | Popularity: 4%An interesting study just published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) revealed two interesting findings.
- Searching high-quality online resources improves consumers’ health knowledge; and
- Consumers’ degree of “confidence” in their answers is not a good indicator of whether their answers are correct.
Neither finding surprises me. The first one is certainly intuitive, although some health care professionals have resisted this notion (notably, the now infamous Dr. Scott Haig).
The second is concerning from the perspective of consumers’ perceptions of the quality of online health information. The Pew Internet Project has documented that only a quarter of health Internet users even check the source most of the time, let alone really know whether the information they find is truly high quality.
Moreover, even though organizations that I greatly respect, such as the Medical Library Association, that provide guidelines to consumers about how to search for high-quality health information, empirical, peer-reviewed research (including some I have conducted myself) tells us that these guidelines do little to guide consumers to accurate and comprehensive health content.
That’s why we need a more rigorous strategy for guiding consumers to high-quality health content. It’s a system that can be built with a modest investment of resources.
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