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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 19269

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: Journal Article

Law MR, Mintzes B, Morgan SG
The Sources and Popularity of Online Drug Information: An Analysis of Top Search Engine Results and Web Page Views
The Annals of Pharmacotheraphy 2011 Feb 22;
http://www.theannals.com/cgi/content/abstract/aph.1P572v1


Abstract:

BACKGROUND: The Internet has become a popular source of health information. However, there is little information on what drug information and which Web sites are being searched.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the sources of online information about prescription drugs by assessing the most common Web sites returned in online drug searches and to assess the comparative popularity of Web pages for particular drugs.

METHODS: This was a cross-sectional study of search results for the most commonly dispensed drugs in the US (n = 278 active ingredients) on 4 popular search engines: Bing, Google (both US and Canada), and Yahoo. We determined the number of times a Web site appeared as the first result. A linked retrospective analysis counted Wikipedia page hits for each of these drugs in 2008 and 2009.

RESULTS: About three quarters of the first result on Google USA for both brand and generic names linked to the National Library of Medicine. In contrast, Wikipedia was the first result for approximately 80% of generic name searches on the other 3 sites. On these other sites, over two thirds of brand name searches led to industry-sponsored sites. The Wikipedia pages with the highest number of hits were mainly for opiates, benzodiazepines, antibiotics, and antidepressants.

CONCLUSIONS: Wikipedia and the National Library of Medicine rank highly in online drug searches. Further, our results suggest that patients most often seek information on drugs with the potential for dependence, for stigmatized conditions, that have received media attention, and for episodic treatments. Quality improvement efforts should focus on these drugs.

Keywords:
drug information, health information, Internet, prescription drugs.

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909