Unsponsored websites give best surgery info

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - If you’re searching the Internet for surgery information, you may want to stick with sites run by professional medical groups and other sources free of commercial sponsors, a new study suggests.

In a study that examined the quality of various surgery-related websites, researchers found that unsponsored sites generally gave more reliable information than sponsored sites did. When it came to the specific sources, sites run by professional medical groups got the highest marks, followed by government-run sites.

The findings, published in the Journal of the American College of Surgery, underscore the need for consumers to consider the source when looking for online medical information.

“Empowering patients with a trusted source of information will lead to better informed patients and, in turn, improved expectations of surgery outcomes,” senior researcher Dr. Clifford Ko, a professor of surgery at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a statement.

“Surgeons should steer patients to high-quality medical Web sites until an accepted, widely used seal of credibility is established,” Ko added.

For their study, Ko and his colleagues assessed 145 websites they found doing a Google search for various types of surgery, like gastric bypass and gallbladder removal. Of these sites, 90 were unsponsored and 55 were sponsored.

Sponsored sites are those in which advertisers pay the search engine for a “sponsored link.” These links are listed separately from other website hits on the search-results page, and ordered according to how much the advertisers paid and how often consumers click on the link.

Ko and his colleagues analyzed all 145 sites for criteria such as how accurately they explained the risks and benefits of a procedure, whether the information was up-to-date and whether the site limited advertising.

Overall, the researchers found, unsponsored sites scored twice as high on the quality scale than sponsored sites did. No site run by a professional medical society or by the government was sponsored, and these sites generally had the most reliable information, the study found.  Continued…

Source

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Related Posts:


Review Summary It’s not news that weight loss is on the minds of many individuals these days, but it may be surprising to some Americans that we are on the verge of a nation wide health emergency that is directly related to weight gain and obesity. Issues like weight gain and obesity increase the risk for

Full Post: Bioburn Uses Fat Burning Technology to Tone Abs, Thighs and Waistlines
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Obese people who have lost substantial amounts of weight without surgery can do just as well at maintaining the healthier weight as their peers who lost weight via gastric surgery. That’s the finding of the first study to compare the two strategies. However, people who go the non-surgical route may have

Full Post: Weight can be kept off no matter how it’s lost
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - An elderly person who has fractured their femur - the large thigh bone that connects the leg to the hip - may want to have surgery sooner rather than later, according to a study linking longer times to surgery to a somewhat increased risk of post-surgery complications. Dr. Rudiger Smektala from

Full Post: Delayed surgery may affect fracture recovery
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

By Michelle Rizzo NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Whether brain surgery is likely to improve or worsen memory in a patient with epilepsy can be predicted before the operation is performed, according to findings in the journal Neurology. Brain surgery can be very effective for some patients whose seizures do not respond to antiepileptic drugs, “but it

Full Post: Benefits of epilepsy surgery predicted pre-op
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

By Anne Harding NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Consumers who rely on the user-edited Web resource Wikipedia for information on medications are putting themselves at risk of potentially harmful drug interactions and adverse effects, new research shows. Dr. Kevin A. Clauson of Nova Southeastern University in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida and his colleagues found few factual errors

Full Post: Wikipedia often omits important drug information: study

Site Navigation

Most Read

Search

Contact

  • kinwrite.com@gmail.com