My Presentation:)

Beware: Judgement needed!
The problem with using the internet as a source of information




So what's the problem?...
The problem with the internet as a source of information is simply we forget that the judgement is left to us.
We read and read and….read but forget that not everything is true, we tend to act like a fool in love…
New problem?...nope but
Today, the internet is more freely available and so it is easier to get your message out so the level of inaccurate and sometimes dangerous information available has risen.
This can be seen with the rise of people self-diagnosing themselves from the internet

Self- Diagnosing from Dr. Google..
The internet is filled with medical and health sites so its not surprising that self-diagnosing is on the rise.
Using the internet for general information is one thing that can easily be corrected but…when used for medical reasons and incorrect, the consequences can be life-threatening and not as easily corrected.
Many people are just happy that they can access information any where at anytime and so forget that judgement is needed on whether the site is reliable. The internet is like an un-moderated message board that needs our judgement.
Some medical websites endorse unproven therapies and medicines which can be dangerous.


Studies done in this area....
Microsoft carried out a study investigating the rise of ‘cyberchondria’
In this study they ‘analysed the internet behaviour of a million surfers around the world and carried out a survey of more than 500microsoft employees, to discover how the internet is giving many of us an acute case of the heebie-jeebies’.
They concluded that the problem started with bias ‘nobody is excited to write about caffeine withdrawal and its role in headaches, but Brain tumours- that's more interesting’.
Search engines are not savvy about bias- they are programmed to generate results relevant on the query, not the person making it. Many people are forgetting this and putting themselves in danger.


And because there is a disproportionate level of attention given to scary diseases people diagnose themselves with rare diseases.
For example; Microsoft searched ‘Headache’ and a quarter of the documents thrown up by the web points to a brain tumour which they state is mercifully rare, developing in fewer than one in 50,000 people.
People seem to think they have a medical degree just because they can search for symptoms or conditions on the internet, which can lead to the wrong diagnosis and the wrong treatment which is serious.


PEW also carried out research and revealed that 8 of 10 people use the internet for medical or health reasons and about the same proportion (75%) do not check the source of that information or the date it was created.
I can stat a website that says anything, a medical degree is not needed to give faulty advice or endorse unproven therapies.
The fact that people are willing to use the internet for their health shows just how much they rely on the internet and how willing they are to trust it without checking who is behind it or even the date it was created, even with something as important as ones health.


Diagnosis is complex, GP’s train for years to do this and many academics also do. They become experts in medicine or Romantic literature by researching it for years
But the internet is open to everyone with a connection and access so there are many people writing about areas that they know little about whether medicine or poetry we must carry our judgement into the cyber world with us and not believe everything we read.
The internet ranges from scholarship pages to the most haphazard pages and the problem is many people lose their judgement on the way and seem to believe that ‘it must be true, I read it on the internet’.


Solutions?
Ignoring the internet as a source is not the answer as this would involve missing out on the great scholarship pages that do exist such as the ‘Blake Archive’ and JSTOR etc.
One solution used by many is only trusting the .EDU sites but this leads to the assumption that people who went to university are brighter then people who didn't, which is not always the case.
Another solution is simply teach people to judge for themselves whether a webpage is reliable or not before allowing all trust with the page.
Thus: making people less vulnerable to shoddy work and harmful medical sites
Teaching to evaluate claims of authority instead of sheltering under .EDU

Conclusion
Internet search engines have some of the answers but it should be used in conjunction with a doctors advice, rather than in place of it.
Just as the internet should be used in conjunction with a lecture or class or whatever, instead of in place of it.

‘knowledge is power, but nothing beats years of clinical experience-yet’


The End