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HealthHints Archives

Accessing Reliable Health Information

Volume 3, Number 11 - January, 2000

Editors: Carol A. Rice, Ph.D., RN, Professor and Extension Health Specialist, and Janet M. Pollard, MPH, Extension Associate-Health

Inside HealthHints....

Accessing Reliable Health Information

This issue of HealthHints will identify ways to find reliable health information both on and off the Internet. This information will help you to help your clientele:

This information is not meant to help self-diagnose a health condition.

Educated health care consumers come to office visits prepared with a list of their symptoms, current prescriptions and over-the-counter medications and good questions about their concerns.

They work in partnership with their doctor and health care team. Educated health care consumers are more likely to receive quality care because they are able to give health care providers adequate information to combine with examination results during office visits.

Note: See your Healthwise Handbook, Chapter 1, for further information about being a wise medical consumer. If you do not have a Healthwise Handbook and want one, call Healthwise at 208-345-1161 (they are not available in bookstores).

Six Suggestions for Researching a Medical Condition

The following guidelines give ideas on where to begin when researching a medical condition or other health issue or concern.

1. Ask Your Health Care Providers

Most health providers are very busy. Yet, most will gladly answer questions or requests for clarification of their diagnosis, treatments, instructions, and prescriptions. Start here on your search for information.

Ask your health care provider to explain things you do not understand. If questions occur to you after the visit, call the health care provider's office and ask to talk to your physician, nurse, or other practitioner. Many large clinics or health maintenance organizations have nurse help lines for patients, too.

Questions about prescriptions can be answered by your pharmacist. All pharmacies provide both verbal and written instructions on prescribed medicines. Pharmacists will also answer questions about over-the-counter medications.

2. Consult a Medical Reference Book

Consider consulting medical reference books. Buy several reference books to use as needed. Go to a bookstore, look through the references in the "health" section, and choose one reference that provides information on medical conditions and another providing sound information on drugs. Some might also want a book on laboratory tests. A good self-care reference such as the Healthwise Handbook and Healthwise for Life (see above for ordering information) can also be very beneficial to have on hand.

Make your choice based on the reference's connection to a well-known medical institution, such as Johns Hopkins or Mayo Clinic, or to a well-known, preferably nonprofit health organization, such as the American Medical Association or American Heart Association. Comprehensive medical references like the Merck Manual (there is now a lay version) may also be helpful.

To make a wise choice, look up a specific health problem in each book and decide if the language is understandable and gives you useable information. This is especially true when buying a drug or laboratory reference -- try looking up a specific drug or laboratory test; if the information provided is too technical to be helpful, keep looking. Here are some of our suggestions for you to evaluate for purchase:

3. Surf the Internet

While much information can be found regarding medical conditions on the Internet, it is important that you find sources that are reliable and accurate. Some information on the Internet may be dangerously incomplete or downright wrong. The best way to find sound information is to try sites maintained by the following:

You can also try the following options:

Additionally, seek out the government guidelines for specific health concerns. Two federal agencies keep the current best treatments for a wide array of diseases:

4. Call a Nonprofit Group

Many nonprofit organizations are devoted to specific health problems, and have toll-free number for ordering educational materials (often free of charge) and talking with specialists.

5. Join a Support Group

Joining a support group allows you personal contact with people sharing the same problem and their resources. Try to find a group associated with a national organization devoted to fighting the disease or dealing with your health concern.

6. Go to the Library

Most communities have a public library. (You may also want to find out if any hospital, university, or city or county maintained medical libraries are available to the public.) While some libraries have many up-to-date health references, others do not. Others carry popular books as well as researched-based medical references. Judge the books as described above, making sure they are linked to a well known medical institution or nonprofit organization like the American Heart Association.

What almost all libraries do have are computers networked for access to the Internet. Some suggestions were offered above about beginning on Internet search. The next section will identify ways to make that search even more productive (Consumer Reports on Health, 1998).

Searching for a Needle in a Haystack

At this point, the Internet has tens of millions of sites and is growing daily with no bibliographic control (Kansas City Public Library, 1999). Thus, searching for the topic of your choice can be like searching for a "needle in a haystack." There are two basic strategies to help you find the subject matter for which you are searching:

  1. Subject directories/guides
  2. Search engines (including meta-search engines).

Subject Directories

Subject directories include human-selected Internet resources that are arranged into subject categories and subcategories, hierarchically. They are searchable by keyword or browsing the classifications. Most search engines have a subject directory component. Some of the best-known examples are Yahoo, Open Directory, Looksmart, Britannica, Snap, and Magellan. Subject guides are good for browsing:

For specific information, however, a search engine is probably a better choice (Kansas City Public Library, 1999).

Search Engines

Unlike subject directories, search engines use software robots to survey the Web and build their databases, rather than employing a human-selection and categorization process. The software robot retrieves and indexes Web documents. Thus, when you enter a query (e.g., search term[s] or keywords), your input is checked against the search engine's keyword indices, and the best matches are returned to you as "hits" (Barlow, 1999).

Though search engines try to find and index as many sites as possible, the scope, size, and accuracy of these databases vary greatly. Some search engines search every word in a document and select the words used most often as their "keywords" (excluding words such as and, or, but, in, etc.). Others select by words in the title and the first and last 20 words in a document. Still, other search author selected terms (meta-tags) and use these in their keyword indices (Barlow, 1999). No one search engine captures all of the documents on the Web. Results will vary based on:

Search engines are best used for:

Some of the most well-known search engines include Alta Vista, Excite, Google, HotBot, Infoseek, Lycos, Northern Light, and WebCrawler.

Meta Search Engines

There are also search engines, known as meta search engines, which allow you to query several search engines at once. Common examples of meta search engines include Ask Jeeves, Dogpile, Find It, and MetaCrawler. Since meta search engines do not allow input of many search variables, their best use is often to see if something is on the Internet or to find hits on more obscure items.

Selecting a Searching Tool

With all of these choices, it can be difficult to decide which searching tool is best. By spending a little time learning how to use these tools, however, you can greatly improve the output of your query. Here are some tips to help get you started.

On-line Help

The on-line help pages of each search engine and subject directory can be very useful in refining your search for better results, try some of these help sites or the help sites on other search engines of your choice:

Note: The help button at each search engine site may have different titles. Look for titles such as help, how to search, search tips, general and advanced searching.

Keyword vs. Concept

There are two basic ways of doing a search -- keyword and concept. Keyword searching is the simplest, and most common type of text search and most search engines have this capability. The downside of keyword searching is that it does not distinguish between words with the same meaning, same spelling, etc. Thus, you may get hits that are totally irrelevant to the subject you are trying to search. Keyword searches also do not return hits on keywords that mean the same thing, but that are not in your query.

Conversely, concept-based search systems (such as Excite) try to determine "what you mean," not just what you say in your query. This process can be very complex, but most simply is done by calculating how often certain important words appear in Web documents. Several words or phrases are then tagged to represent a particular concept. Through statistical analysis of their frequency, these documents are returned to you as hits.

For example, the word "heart" could lead to hits about arteriosclerosis or Valentine's Day. Thus a concept-based search about the heart in the health context would return hits about the heart in reference to blood, arteries, attacks, arteriosclerosis, etc., rather than giving you hits on the nearest florist for Valentine's Day gift giving (Barlow, 1999). One word of caution, sometimes concept-based searches work better in theory than in practice. Results are often best when many words referring to the sought concept are entered in the query (Barlow, 1999).

Truncation/Stemming/Using a Wildcard

Some search engines have problems with "stemming." That is, if you enter the word "parent" in your query, should it return hits on parenting, parenthood, parents, etc.? One way to deal with this problem is to discover if the search tool you are using allows you to use a "wildcard" or "truncate" a word. Some tools may have automatic truncation, meaning you would get hits on all forms of the word. Other search tools will require you to use an asterisk (a.k.a.: wildcard or truncation) in your query, for example parent* to get multiple forms of the word. This can also be used on a partial word, such as activ*, to get hits on active, activities, etc., however, you might also get unwanted hits on activate, activated, etc.

Boolean Operators

Many search tools allow you to use Boolean operators to refine your search. Boolean operators usually include the words AND, OR, NOT, NEAR, FOLLOWED BY, and ADJ. Some search tools use + and - characters instead of AND and NOT.

AND means that all the terms you specify must appear in the document, e.g., heart AND attack.

OR means that at least one of the terms you specify must appear in the document, e.g, tension OR stress.

NOT means that at least one of the terms you specify must not appear in the document, e.g., diabetes NOT type 1.

NEAR means the terms you enter should appear within a certain number of words from each other, e.g., headache NEAR migraine.

FOLLOWED BY means one term must directly follow the other (ADJ, for adjacent, is also used in this manner), e.g., heart FOLLOWED BY attack or cardiac ADJ arrest.

The use of parentheses also can help to separate types of boolean operators, e.g., fruit AND (bananas OR strawberries).

Capitalization

You might also want to consider whether or not your search tool is case or non-case specific. If you want to do a search on Bill Gates, you might also get hits on bills and gates if the search engine doesn't specify case. Some search engines provide all cases if you place your query in lower case, (e.g., the query texas would give results with texas, Texas, and TEXAS), but give only capitalized "hits" if your query begins using upper case (e.g., the query Texas would only give results in the same form -- Texas).

Phrases

Additionally, if you need to search a specific phrase, many searches allow this with the use of quotations, for example "may the force be with you."

Field Searching/Limiting

You may also limit or refine your search by using field indicators. Field searching allows the searcher to designate where a specific search term will appear, such as the title, url, or first header (Notess, 1999a). To use this capability, you include the "field" in your query. For example, to search urls only as your field, you would type your query in the search box as follows -- url: fda, which would render hits on web addresses with the term fda in them.

Search Engine Starting Points at the Click of a Button

To try out some of the most well-known search engines, here are their websites.

Feature Article: Finding Health Information on the Internet

Last year, more than 25 million patients visited at least one of an estimated 15,000 plus consumer health information Internet sites(1). Never before has so much information -- and misinformation -- about health and disease been so easily accessible. Advice for travelers, patients' chat rooms, information about health, medical conditions, drugs, and procedures -- all are there in cyberspace. But, how do you find what you are looking for and how do you know if what you find is authoritative?

Efficiently finding good information can be a challenge for the typical Internet user. For example, say you are looking for information about migraine headaches. You could use a general search engine such as Excite. Excite returns more than 71,000 hits for the phrase "migraine headaches." The first 10 include:

Another choice in general search engines, google.com, finds more than 5,000 sites. Several of those listed first, however, are from educational institutions (.edu) or nonprofit organizations (.org) suggesting, but not insuring, that the information is not biased by the motivation to sell a product.

Here are four authoritative health information sites you might want to visit, bookmark and recommend for easy access to quality health information. Note: The list is not comprehensive, some sites lead to others that may not be authoritative, and, like the rest of the Internet, everything is subject to change!

These sites often refer to one another -- for example, MEDLINEplus will point to HealthFinder entries, drkoop.com links to the AMA site. Actually, that is somewhat reassuring, indicating authority and agreement about content. Use these sites as guides, and your searches for health information should produce good results.

Gale G. Hannigan, MLS, MPH
TAMU Medical Sciences Library and TAMUS HSC School of Rural Public Health
(1) MD Consult, 11/17/99

Authoritative Health Information Sites

In addition to general search engines and those sites listed in the "Feature Article" (above), here are some other starting points for obtaining authoritative health information on the Internet.

Comprehensive Health Information Sites

Specialized Health Information Sites

Thank you to the following individuals from the TAMU Medical Sciences Library for their contributions to this issue of HealthHints.

Dottie Eakin, MLS
Gale G. Hannigan, MLS, MPH
Christine Foster, MLS

References

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Last updated: 8 July, 2008

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