First thing I noted was Mike's (lecturer) notes about medical advice needs to be based on trust and identity: not unlike the previous topic of online romance and sexuality.
When I was seeing a specialist recently I joked that self-diagnosis via Google (Eysenbach, 2008) was probably his worst nightmare. He wasn't so dismissive, saying he 'Googles' frequently. But, for me, the difference between a non-medical practitioner and a practitioner hopping online to research medical conditions is that the medical practitioner has a little more understanding about what they're reading than the non-medical person. Having said that, the searching could be influenced by their own bias - and Google's filter bubbles (Pariser, 2011).
In searching for information regarding Atrial Fibrilation (AF) google predicts what I might want to type and suggested four search terms: treatment, causes, emedicine and ecg. I chose causes and was faced with pages of links. How do I assess quickly which are credible? Ordinarily I might limit the results to Australian pages, but, in this case I won't because of the opportunity for global knowledge. I scanned for sites or names I recognised and ended up linking to It's My Health because it was an Australian link. I was expecting it to be a little tacky, but, it was very clean, clear and easy to navigate. It also gave the name of the writer, who was a GP in Australia, so I felt a certain level of comfort. I also expected the information to be very wordy; it wasn't and all the information was explained very simply in a paragraph or two and dot-points. This site linked to AF section on The Australian Heart Foundation website, which had the same information but linked to an AF information sheet (pdf). This contained a lot more detail and was around eight pages. It was easy to read but would've been better with links to heading or an index of some sort. The It's My Health site had several ways of finding what you were looking for: by name of condition, symptoms or body part. While there I did a search on another medical condition that had no information on the site.
The next site I went to from my search results was the Mayo Clinic - AF. This site had a similar depth of information to the others but included diagrams. Because there was no personal information on the page it took me to, ie. a doctor's name, I scanned the page for information about the clinic. I found a link to a Mayo Clinic Health Manager tool where there was 'About' link. It's a site which manages a family's medical matters, not unlike the centralised data described in Eysenbach's reading. From what I can tell it seems to be a US based site. The legal information refers to Microsoft Corporation and a little further reading reveals that you must have a Microsoft Health Vault account as well to use the service. I'm not sure I'm comfortable revealing information this personal to Microsoft. I got more interested in looking around the Mayo Clinic's site - you can look for a doctor or make an appointment. I can imagine that this could work for some people who may put off calling to make a time and would rather fill in the fields in the online form, hit send and wait for a call. When digging around the education section I discovered there is a Mayo Clinic College where you can get a degree in medicine. This site seems to be a coming together of many parts of medicine and provides a community where anyone can find information relevant to their purpose, as a patient, professional, researcher or student. The clinic seems to have established a very intricate online presence and the visitor should be able to navigate their way around the site fairly easily.
All the information about AF matched fairly closely with what I already knew about the condition. In fact, when hearing or taking in this information for the first time there is so much that plenty is not remembered. It was useful to go back.
The Australian Heart Foundation, Artrial Fibrilation, http://www.heartfoundation.org.au/your-heart/cardiovascular-conditions/pages/atrial-fibrillation.aspx
Gunther Eysenbach. (2008, August 25). Medicine 2.0: Social Networking, Collaboration, Participation, Apomediation, and Openness. Journal of Medical Internet Research. 10(3).
It's My Health, Artrial Fibrilation, http://www.itsmyhealth.com.au/conditions/heart/atrial-fibrillation
Microsoft Health Vault, http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/healthvault/default.aspx
Pariser, E. (2011). Beware online "filter bubbles". http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html
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