i agree… even when I search the internet for information i get into trouble. Many sites publish the extreme cases, horror stories, and unproven treatments. The medical sites you link to are better… but I agree that patients should only use them to gather a broad view of their complicated and nuanced medical problems.
BTW – Is Nuance a bad word among the Bush-ites?

People who take their health solely into their own hands, without physician guidance, are asking for trouble.So you’re saying internet health resource use is an either/or thing: either people see a doctor OR they totally take things into their own hands? That seems a wee bit simplistic to me.

Health care providers are simply too busy to give the kind of patient education needed to follow medical advice. The huge number of women seeking simple postop information (how much is a fever? why am I tired after surgery? if stuff comes out of my incision, what does it mean?) on, for an example with which I’m especially familiar, hysterectomy message lists demonstrates that however much physicians may want to be their patients’ sole source of health-related information, it’s not working.

There’s a lot of worthless rubbish online, just as there is on TV and in any library or periodical. But wouldn’t it be more cost-effective, not to mention less patronizing, to consider that making people better consumers would ultimately be more useful to them?

“. . . we become so confused by conflicting information we get from doctors and the internet that we make our own, sometimes misguided, decisions.” Everyone knows that I am a big proponent of using the internet as a way to empower patients – I have done a lot of work in this area. It certainly is an invaluable tool. I was just emphasizing that it should only be a *part* of the overall treatment plan, combined with physicians’ input and interpretation of the information. Where patients get into trouble is when they solely use the internet to make sometimes misguided decisions, without any physician input.