People who self-diagnose and self-prescribe using the Internet could be doing themselves more harm than good, according to a study from the University of Waterloo.
The researchers found that while many people feel confident they can assess the effectiveness of treatments found on the web, separating medically beneficial ones from those that are a waste of money, dubious or even harmful is not as easy as people think.
People who self-diagnose and self-prescribe using the Internet could be doing themselves more harm than good, according to a study from the University of Waterloo.
The researchers found that while many people feel confident they can assess the effectiveness of treatments found on the web, separating medically beneficial ones from those that are a waste of money, dubious or even harmful is not as easy as people think.
“We found that search results have a significant effect on people’s ability to make correct treatment decisions,” said Amira Ghenai, a Ph.D. candidate at Waterloo’s David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science and the lead author of the study. “In short, finding bad information is worse than having no information at all.”
The study, which was published in the proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGIR International Conference on Theory of Information Retrieval, examines how 60 Waterloo students went about executing searches for medical treatment online. The search results participants saw were intentionally biased toward correct or incorrect information for 10 medical treatments. For each treatment, participants were shown a search page with 10 results modelled after what they would see if they had used Google or Bing. Each result had a document title, a snippet of text and a URL to a page.
Read more at University of Waterloo
