An article in the New Scientist recently examines the use of the Internet by consumers and health professionals to see how they use websites such as Wikipedia to find basic health information. In Should you trust health advice from the web?, Lisa Grossman has brought together the latest research on this topic into a highly readable article. Apparently, Wikipedia, as the eighth most visited site on the Internet, is a of some concern. Wikipedia articles appear in the top 10 results for more than 70 per cent of medical queries in four different search engines, and it gets more hits than MedlinePlus from the National Library of Medicine. In addition, a recent US report found that 50% of doctors turn to Wikipedia for health information.
Grossman praises Wikipedia as being factually very accurate. "But any Wikipedia page (beyond those locked to prevent vandalism) is vulnerable to malicious editing - and some drug firms have been caught removing negative information on their drugs from Wikipedia pages. The site's other major flaw is its incompleteness."
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