Mundane Realities of Using The Net For Health Information

The Task
The first reading for our current module, Health: What my doctor didn't tell me, is titled The mundane realities of the everyday lay use of the Internet for heath, and their consequences for media convergence by S Nettleton, R Burrows and L O'Malley.

The Summary
This summarises the main attitudes of people towards online health information as presented in the article. Attitudes towards online health can be totally against it, think it is a great and empowering thing or see is as complementary to services provided by medical practitioners. The article focused on people in the last category, seeing the others as too extreme.

Some of the rhetorical devices that were mentioned that are used to determine if a site is trustworthy or not are:

• Trust for sites within own national boundaries, but not for ones from other countries
• Trust for sites from recognised real world organisations (eg World Health Organisation), but not from organisations they haven't herd of.
• Higher trust for non-commercial sites with commercial sites being seen as only trying to sell their own product. Sometimes well established, known and long running companies are an exception to this.
• More trusted when the information on the site is either directly from a medical professional or endorsed by a medical professional, though still viewed with caution if the later.
• Experience of others is not trusted.
• If the information is repeated on most sites visited and seems to be the majority view it will usually be trusted.

It was also noted that people see 'others' as likely to be duped into trusting poor medical advice while seeing them selves as cautious enough to not be fooled into listening to inaccurate advice.

People also tend to use online health information as part of there overall medical experience. This might be in the form of researching if they should see a doctor, finding out more so they can ask the doctor better questions and better understand the information from the doctor, or to just further the information they have been given to help discuss this with others.

The Modern Relevance
The research in the article was conducted in 2002, seven years ago. Despite this I still think that much of it is relevant today. Even though the proliferation of the Internet has increased I still think when it comes to health information people are wary and want to ensure they only follow quality advise. As such I think that people will still be wary of information sourced from the Internet and many of the above criteria that individuals indicated would still apply.

I think the limitations of the above study in terms of relevance is not so much when the study was done but how the study was done. The study was a qualitative study of 6 Britain citizens from a range of economic classes. If they had spoken to people from countries other than Britain would they have had the same level of nationalism in the sites they would trust? If they had spoken to people from a larger range of ages and socio-economic classes would the results be the same? These are the sorts of questions that need to be asked and answered before the results can be generalised more widely.