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Consumer Health Informatics pp 61–81Cite as

Level 0: Searching – Finding – Trusting – Acting – Risking One’s Life?

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Part of the book series: Health Informatics ((HI))

Abstract

The Internet and mobile apps have become so commonplace that using them to find health information and guidance is a natural consequence. Surveys confirm large and still rising figures of citizens actually searching and interpreting such information. Surveys also demonstrate alarming deficiencies:

  • Irrational management of information

  • Deceived self assessment of one’s competence

  • Erroneous interpretation of found advice

Regarding the indeterminacy and inaccuracy of widely used search engines when using lay language and the extent of intentionally biased material it is amazing how little Internet caused harm is reported. Attempts to emulate human instincts to search for trust anchors through sensual trustmarks for high quality resources have by and large failed. Commonly acknowledged quasi authorities such as the NLM or Wikipedia do not excel in quality.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Google is a trademark of Google Inc.

  2. 2.

    Some of the found websites highlight urgent diagnoses but others just list them.

  3. 3.

    Google is a trademark of Google Inc., also in combinations google.com, google.ca. Yahoo! is a trademark of Yahoo! Inc. Bing is a registered trademark of Microsoft. For better readability theTM and® signs are not attached to every occurrence of the trademarked symbols in this section.

  4. 4.

    Pew Research Center is a Washington DC based “nonpartisan fact tank …trends shaping America and the World.”

  5. 5.

    Health On the Net Foundation, http://www.hon.ch

  6. 6.

    Meanwhile merged to form the WG Consumer and Pervasive Health Informatics.

  7. 7.

    These observations were collected on March 14, 2015, and things may be different on March 15. However, the general impression of NLM’s policy of “Let’s show all the related stuff we have” has been the same throughout visits in the past.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Medical Biometry and Informatics, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany

    Thomas Wetter

  2. Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, WA, USA

    Thomas Wetter

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  1. Thomas Wetter
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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Wetter, T. (2016). Level 0: Searching – Finding – Trusting – Acting – Risking One’s Life?. In: Consumer Health Informatics. Health Informatics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19590-2_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19590-2_3

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-19589-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-19590-2

  • eBook Packages: MedicineMedicine (R0)

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