Recent research reported by New Scientist (25 July 2009) has commented on the wide variability of health information on the internet and the influence of the all pervasive Wikipedia. This is no surprise as a significant volume of websites providing health information are either commercial interests, copied articles from other unchecked sources, heresay or outright quackery. Of interest is the high ranking of Wikipedia in search engine queries whereby the website appears in the top 10 results for more than 70% of medical qeries in four different search engines.
How reliable is Wikipedia? Universities have regularly warned tertiary-level students not to rely on Wikipedia as a source for their assignments. However US healthcare consultancy, Manhattan Research, has reported that 50% of doctors in its research had turned to Wikipedia for information. Of note, New Scientist quotes several studies which have examined information on surgery, drugs and other health information and found the online resource to be entirely free of factual and free of error. The US National Institutes of Health hosted an event on 16 July 2009 with the aim of training health professionals how to edit Wikipedia's health pages.
Wikipedia has considerable value as a layman's tool and for providing an overview of health information. For the health professional the key data sources though will remain ones such as Medline, PubMed, BMJ, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Cochrane Collaboration and other peer reviewed journals.
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