Study: Health info on the Web often incomplete

By Elizabeth Cohen
CNN Medical Unit

ATLANTA (CNN) -- Health information on Internet sites can be hard to find and it's often incomplete, according to a panel of doctors who surveyed information on 25 Web sites.

"Health information on the Internet is inefficient, incomplete and incomprehensible to many Americans," said Sam Karp, a spokesman for the California HealthCare Foundation, a private group that funded the study, which is being published in this week's Journal of the American Medical Association.

The study looked at information on both English- and Spanish-language Web sites about four conditions: breast cancer, childhood asthma, depression and obesity. The researchers found that for English-language sites, the information was between 75 percent and 91 percent accurate and between 53 percent and 96 percent accurate for the Spanish-language site.

MORE Read the full study in JAMA Read JAMA's Patient Page on Internet Health information     ALSO How do you use the Internet to get health information? Click here for a sampling of reader submissions

Several panels of doctors also judged whether the information contained all the "clinical elements" they deemed worthy of coverage. They found that, on average, obesity sites missed 35 percent of what the doctors considered to be clinical elements deserving of coverage. The other diseases fared better; for example, on the breast cancer sites, 16 percent of the clinical elements were not covered.

"Health information on the Internet has progressed from early childhood to what I would call an awkward adolescence," Karp said. "It's gaining in scope but still not dependable or reliable."

In a separate article, the editors of JAMA issued guidelines for patients searching the Internet for health information. First, they suggested to use the Internet to complement -- not replace -- consultations with a doctor.

They also suggested asking doctors for their recommendations on Web sites, checking the credentials of the people writing the information, and determining whether the people running the Web site have a vested interest, namely whether they're trying to sell a product.

In the study, the authors found that Spanish-language sites were less accurate and more incomplete. For example, they found that two-thirds of what were considered important elements of depression were not addressed.

"The good news is in English-language Web sites the information is there, but on Spanish-language Web sites there are striking deficiencies," said Dr. Gretchen Berland, lead author of the study, who works for RAND Health, the research division within the private, non-profit research organization RAND.

The study also found Web sites sometimes contained contradictory information. One site, for example, stated that inhaled steroids do not stunt growth in children, but later concluded the opposite.

The study looked at a variety of Web sites, including those of the National Institutes of Health, WebMD, and DrKoop.com. The ratings were averages and not specific to individual Web sites.

The study also found that search engines often yielded irrelevant information. The authors found that only one in five links identified by 10 English-language search engines led to a Web page with relevant content.

They also found that all the sites in English required high-school level or greater reading ability.