Patients like physicians – still use the internet

Patients Trust Physicians, but Are Likely to Go to Internet for Health Information

I have no problem with patient internet usage. I do hope that over time we can have a method for recommending sites with valuable high quality information.

Obviously, I use the internet a great deal, as do you. The problem we have when investigating any subject is to validate the source for quality. If one browses the internet for medical questions, one can find varying quality levels.

With those reservations, I would rather respond to a patient who takes enough interest in their health to spend time on the internet. My only concern is for those patients who find what they want to find, rather than finding the best evidence.

Before the internet, we had patients who would look everything up in the Merck Index. This is not a new phenomenon, just a more accessible one.

“The context in which patients consume health information has changed dramatically with diffusion of the Internet, advances in telemedicine, and changes in media health coverage,” lead investigator Dr. Bradford W. Hesse and his associates point out in their report, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine for December 12/26.

To track these changes, Dr. Hesse with the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, and his associates analyzed data procured in the first Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS), administered by telephone to 6369 adults between October 2002 and April 2003.

Results showed that 63.0% of respondents had ever used the Internet. Of these, 63.7% had looked there for some type of health or medical information. Other health-related Internet activities, such as purchasing medication, communicating with physicians, or participating in an online support group, were taken advantage of by less than 10% of users.

The authors report that 62.4% of respondents said that they trusted physicians “a lot” for cancer information, compared with 23.9% for the Internet.

When asked where they would prefer to go first for information about cancer, 49.5% reported wanting to go to their physicians. In actuality, only 10.9% of those who had sought information about cancer reported having gone to the physician as a source of first resort, whereas 48.6% went to the Internet first.

“Ongoing attention may be needed to adjust reimbursement policies for time spent with patients interpreting printouts, for accommodating shifts toward informed and shared decision making, for steering consumers to credible information sources, and for attending to the needs of those who fall through the cracks of the digital divide,” Dr. Hesse’s group suggests.