Finding and evaluating valuable online health resources

You feel sick. You have symptoms. A rash, fever, strange feelings, feeling sad or anxious, insomnia, headache, whatever-ache. Or some symptoms that embarass you. One of the symptoms or more, or other.
You don´t want to bother your parents, they are having enough troubles.
You grab your cell phone and search. Search terms: two or three symptoms. You see the first or in the best case, the second and third results.
Or you go to social media and find people that have the same complaints.
You will find several results. The answer might be there, but most probably not, or not completely.

So, what are the key facts to take into consideration in order to be a smart web surfer, acquire digital literacy, information literacy?

BAD NEWS: NOT ALL ONLINE HEALTH INFORMATION IS ACCURATE, because:

• It might be trying to sell something
• It might be outdated, old information
• It is based on spectacular studies with promising results..... performed on animals
• It is based on data collected from.... 45 patients
• It might be (not unexcepcted in our country) that the information is biased in order to disregard the achievements of the previous government

So, how do we get access to the right information?

Never stopping to ask ourselves:

• Who runs the website? Are they trustable?
• Which is the intention? to inform the population, promotion and prevention? Or publicity?
• What does it say? Does it seem to be too good to be true?
• When has the information been published? Is it updated?
• Where did the information come from? Scientific evidence? Clinical studies?

A good start is using pages with the extension .gov, as these are governmental sources that are not intending to sell therapies or products.

However, there are many very good and interesting sources, you can start using the links suggested on this blog.

And never EVER forget that the WWW is not the only source. It is valuable, yes. But there are experts that can give you a much better insight considering the patient as a whole.

Credits and source: NCCIH, @langwitches