Medical Sites Review

I an reviewing two medical sites here. The first is a peer support site for cancer survivors family and friends called ONCOChat. The second is called WebMD and gives information on a range of diseases and ailments.

ONCO chat clearly states in its opening paragraph that "We don't offer medical advice or professional counseling", rather it is for giving and receiving of support between cancer survivors and their families. When I looked more closely at the chat function I had to agree to terms and conditions before use, one of which was that anyone lurking for more than 20 minutes would be kicked out! Obviously they don't want a site full of lurkers, though I decided to go lurk for a bit and check out how the site is actually being used. After waiting a painfully long time for it to connect, that included a few time outs, I concluded connecting wouldn't happen through there web based method, and I'm not going to the trouble of downloading there software for the other connection method, just so I can lurk in there for a few minutes!

The WebMD site on the other hand gives the initial appearance of providing medical advice and information. However after scrolling down their web site, on the bottom line in small print, well below the last of the interesting stuff that most people would look at I found this statement "WebMD does not provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.". This was the only disclaimer I found on the site and despite the disclaimer they have a search function to search by symptom! Very interesting for a site that claims not to assist with diagnosis! When trying to verify the quality of the site I came across a page that had details of the sites experts, each with a ling string of letters after their name and a specific are of expertise, but very little additional information. A quick overview on some of the topics I feel I know more about, had me coming to the conclusion that the site only provides basic information on topics, though covers an extensive range of topics.

I think that sites like these have affected the health and medical industry by shifting power to the patients. They allow people to find out some information about their conditions online, wither through online 'experts' or through talking to peers with similar issues. They allow for people to look up 'facts' after the visit to their doctor and verify the information given to them They allow people to better equip themselves to question their doctor on both diagnosis and treatments given, and finally they allow people to know there are others out their in the same boat, that they are not alone.

Medicine 2.0

I have just read an article by Gunther Eysenbach on Medicine 2.0. It considers the potential interactions between the medical industry and Web 2.0 technologies. The desire and potential demand of individuals towards having control of their medical information and the interactions between patients, doctors and researchers within such an environment are the key focus and considerations of the article.

Where consumers to have full access and control over their medical records, the relationship between doctor and patient as we see it today would be altered. If patients were to have control over their medical records there would be a power shift from patients being reliant on their GP for all their medical information as it would make it easier for the patient to shift GP's, get second opinions etc.

The potential for social networking being combined with medical information would also have passable far reaching effects. It would become more easy for support groups to be established where people are suffering serious and ongoing ailments. It would also make it easier for individuals to gain insights and advise from others with similar conditions, for better or worse!

Overall this article provided a lot of food for thought on where Medicine 2.0 could be headed. Some of the possibilities are scary to think about, though most are liberating and help shift more power to the patients.

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.

Assignment 1, over and out.

Another one bites the dust! Assignment 1 is finally finished and submitted. For this we had to look at 'everyday Internet use' and how it is part of our lives. This was for yourself, those in the course and how our use compares to others in the course.

I was a little sceptical about this assignment at the start. Though I really enjoyed reading every ones posts and soon got into the assignment :)

Due to Black board being down this coming week we were given a group extension until midnight Friday. I decided not to take this extension though as I am moving house on Friday and won't be able to post it on time if I leave it until Black Board is back up!

Anyway this was a good chance to really reflect more deeply on how I use the net, before work, during the work day and of an evening and compare this to others. Sadly this assignment has just furthered my view that I already spend too much time on the Internet! At least I enjoy it though :)

I want my, I want my, I want my MP3!

Music is part of everyday life in that it provides the background noise other functions are performed to, it sets the mood in other media such as film and television and it provides direct intensive listening episodes where the music is the focus. The Internet impacts on this by creating new ways for fans of alternate music to access there preferred music and also providing more media channels that music is an integral part of.
In response to the reading of Laughey, D. (2007). Music Media in Young People's Everyday Lives. In Music, Sound and Multimedia: From the Live to the Virtual (pp. 172-187). , accessed June 8, 2009.

From reading Beer, a discussion on how Top of the Pops ended, it is clear that increased access to personalised forms of music consummation is seen to have a major role in the demise of this show. The BBS blames the failure of the show on digital media, but does the Internet in itself necessarily work against broadcast media? It is fairly clear that the Internet does have an impact on broadcast media, as discussed in a presentation by Mark Pesce. While this presentation is pertaining to television viewing, many of these same issues would also effect the music industry and music broadcasters.

The effect of MySpace, and in particular the way they display music, also impacts on the music industry. There is a heavy focus on music, presenting new bands and encouraging people to engage with the music through both listening as well as messaging and comments. From my own observations of watching my students access music, many of them go straight to MySpace when they want to listen to music. Those that don't use MySpace to access music will go to similar sites. Due to this I see the effect of such sites increasing in the future and impacting on the more traditional music industry even more heavily.

Taking things too far....

When has someone taken things too far online or cheated on their RL partner online? I think the answer to this is very much individual for each couple depending on the type of relationship a couple has and how they set the boundaries on what is acceptable within their relationship. This varies between people based on religion, culture and other similar aspects that go towards making their individual identity.

I think regardless of what one couple finds appropriate vs another couple, they can all use the same basic following rule to define when things have gone too far online. If you engage in any sort of cyber-activity or conversation that you would not want your partner to know about, you have gone too far!

This is not to say that everyone should tell their partner every tiny detail of of what they do online, for example I'm sure most partners woudn't want to know every word in a chat where you invite your mum around for dinner! On the other hand though if you are doing something that you would purposly hide from your partner you have crossed the line on what is acceptable.

Hello Internet, nice to meet you!

I can't remember the exact year or date, but in the first year or two of the Internet becoming commercially available, my family got connected. I was still a teenager in high school at the time, and had entered a competition where we won first prize... our first modem!

It was a an external grey box and was state of the art in terms of speed at the time. We got ourselves a dial up connection and there was no stopping me... I thought it was great!

I started using the net to look up what ever grabbed my fancy. The connection also came with an email account, but as I didn't know any one else on the net (yet) I didn't use email much and saw it as a rather useless function back then! How sad given I can't live without my email today :)

Over the next year or two some of my friends started getting the Internet and I then had people to email, bringing that into the stuff I used. One of my friends who also loves strategy and war games got connected and we started directly dialing each others PC's to play against each other - something I'm sad to say was easier back then! Now our more sophisticated firewalls and other security create problems with this for us... yes we still play! Though I do remember it would usually take a few tries to get connected.

It wasn't until 2001 that I tried out online shopping, I had previously always been too scared to purchase online as I was afraid of my details being stolen.... a few I have got over, as I now shop online more that in shops (provided I leave the weekly groceries out of that equation!).

My net use has certainly grown over the years, and as the connections get faster I don't get the same stuff done in less time... rather I do more stuff in the same time! The Internet is now my main source of online news, shopping, communication, planning face-to-face social events, gaming, information and well just about everything I do! The Internet is definitely part of my daily life, so much so I would say I am an Internet addict - I'm even taking the laptop and wireless connection with me when I go away on holidays next week, just so I can still do the net banking and a few other basics I consider essential.

Hello NET12

I'm now deep in the first week of NET12 and dispite what I assumed before the unit it appears we don't need to keep a blog for this one.... though I'm going to any way. I was surprised at how dissapointed I was that we don't need to blog for NET12! Though we do need to keep an ongoing record of out thoughts on readings, our experiances during the activities and general reflections... so what better place to do that than to keep this blog going :)

So far the course looks like it will be a lot of fun, with some interesting topics to delve into. It also looks like a lot of work with all the iLectures, readings, activities and not to mention trying to keep up with the discussion board! Anyway time to get back to the set work....