Mark Twain warned that the public should “Beware of health books.
A misprint could kill you.” Now, the same can be said about the
Internet, which is rife with health information that is false,
misleading or biased.

Even more surprising? Many medical Web sites are run by lawyers,
not doctors, hospitals or other health care professionals.

The Center for Medicine in the Public Interest looked into the
issue of health information on the Web after receiving reports from
doctors about patients being increasingly wary about medicines that
they had read about on the Internet.

“The good news is that there’s more information on the Internet
that allows people to take charge of their health care,” said Peter
Pitt, president of CMPI. “But the big danger is that they feel they
don’t need doctors or pharmacists anymore — they think they can use
the Net to diagnose themselves.”

So, CMPI took the Net to determine what patients were looking at
when they searched for information about their medications.

“An analysis of search engine results was not only misleading and
confusing, but dangerous for patients,” said the study. “[It]
revealed that online real estate was dominated by Web sites paid for
and sponsored by either class action law firms or legal marketing
sites searching for plaintiff referrals.”

Negative Slant

The study found that patients who use Google to find information
about medications will “be overwhelmed with negative information and
will find little, if any, solid medical information to help them
weigh the risks versus the benefits of using these medications.”

Google spokeswoman Katie Watson said the company uses more than
200 different signals to rank search results.

She said the company keeps paid advertisements separate from its
“organic” searches. If a company pays for an advertisement, it
appears in a different section of the Web page, and is worked on by
an entirely different department.

“Ad and search rankings are not related in any way, and in fact,
we have entirely separate teams to work on…