How to Find Reliable Health Information on the Web

By Christina Elston

The Web puts a world of health information at your fingertips, but health-care providers urge parents to talk with their doctor before following any family health advice they find online.

You're cooking a new chicken recipe for dinner, and you need to know the amount of carbohydrates in each serving so that your 16-year-old son - who has type 1 diabetes - can accurately set his insulin pump. Do you call the family doctor? Grab your Atkins book?

Like many moms today, Andrea Shahmardian, of Fort Collins, Colo., jumps online to the message boards at the American Diabetes Association Web site www.diabetes.org, where other parents of diabetic kids are ready to help.

"You can ask anything on those message boards and get immediate responses," she says. "There are parents there who have been dealing with diabetes way longer than I have."

Surfing the Web for health information - everything from advice on treating a child's mild bout of diarrhea to research on a new cancer treatment - is common practice for many of us. Eight out of every 10 Americans online use the Internet to gather health information for themselves and their families, according to Michael Smith, M.D., medical editor in chief of the popular WebMD site www.webmd.com. But finding complete, reliable answers to your health queries isn't as easy as the online "search and click" trend makes it appear.

There's a glut of inaccurate information online - and it can lead parents down some confusing, misleading paths, says Tanya Remer Altmann, M.D., a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics' (AAP) committee on media. "Parents see articles online claiming that vaccines are linked to autism, meningitis and other diseases," she says. "They say that they read that sugar can cause AD/HD in their child, but there is no scientific evidence of this."

"I do think it's great that parents want to be involved, and want more information about their child's health," says Altmann, "but they need to be careful about where they're looking for that information."

So, when clicking your way down the health information superhighway, how do you tell the good from the bad? The dependable from the dangerous?

Checking Out Your Online Sources

When visiting specific Web sites for health information, ask yourself the following questions: