According a recent study, 50 percent of physicians who go online for professional reasons use Wikipedia to answer health questions, and the number of doctors who this popular user-generated web encyclopedia has doubled over the past year.
The explanation for this is simple. Doctors, like everybody else, often turn to search engines like Google to quickly find information, and Wikipedia entries tend to come up among the top results.
The fact that Wikipedia is updated in real-time can make it useful for keeping up with new guidelines for managing conditions.
The problem, however, is the accuracy of these articles. Many are written and edited by people not trained in medicine. and despite attempts at quality control and constant editing, errors and fraudulent information may go unnoticed or unchallenged.
Furthermore, a second study looked at how Wikipedia dealt with drug information, and found that its scope was inferior to traditional medication guides. And worse, pharmaceutical companies were caught deleting negative mentions and side effects.
The bottom line is that Wikipedia can be useful to help disseminate breaking medical information. But we have to maintain a healthy skepticism, and Wikipedia should be by no means relied on as an authoritative medical resource.
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{ 15 comments }
Wikipedia may be useful for general stuff, but it’s hardly authoritative, peer reviewed stuff.
I use SearchMedica if I need to find something during a consultation. Like Google, but restricted to medical info & not so much patient-focused material.
I think you make the right point at the end of the text. Wikipedia is fine to START a research, i.e. you can find some useful references and links. But it can’t be your only source or your arrival point, no matter what’s your job, but even more true for MDs!
As a medical transcriptionist, I have always been taught to NOT use Wikipedia since there is no guarantee it is accurate! I sure as hell hope my personal physician does not use Wikipedia to look up things! Physicians should use reliable sources. My personal choice is almost always the Mayo Clinic (among many other resources).
Wikipedia is becoming more and more internationally used, as you mention in your post. It is necessary that somebody should come to endorse its medical content for the protection of internationl use by physician. I suggest the WHO do this for example. At least until sites like Up to Date are not free.
If I use Wiki, it’s only to follow the links.
As far as using google goes, I use Google Scholar – which gives me pretty much the same as pubmed, wtih a much more usable interface.
Wow– this is shocking to me as an internist. Using Wikipedia is an abdication of duty when there are so much better sources of data out there (even if more expensive or less user friendly). To the commenter who mentioned UpToDate not being free– consider it a cost of doing business, then, to have a reliable source of information, whether it be a Harrison’s tome or an online database. But Wikipedia? With no quality control, and as mentioned in the article, easily manipulated? It’s an abdication of duty to use a subpar information source in the care of patients.
I’m not a doctor and can’t vouch for how it works, but I’ve seen this site where doctors collaborate getting noticed.
http://sermo.com/
I’m not a fan of Wikipedia as anything more than a starting place to generate ideas. Maybe in that light it’s not so bad?
As a patient who researches hard my own cancer treatment options, I never even click on wikipedia for my own research. This is troubling info and I will be sure to ask my docs if they use wikipedia, and if so how. I hope they are as stringent as I am.
Wikipedia is a toy! One would hope physicians savvy enough to look up a topic online would be savvy enough to use reliable sources, like PubMed, Merck Manual, etc.
Was anyone polled distinguishing between wikipedia.org and askdrwiki.com? (Were you?) The latter supposedly has input from MDs only.
Any source needs to be considered in context, including the author’s agenda; for any subject (including medicine), different experts may have different opinions on the subject. Such differences in opinions may show up in different rates of particular treatments for the same condition in different regions or hospitals, not explained by demographic or economic differences, for example.
The issue of how complex the question is paramount. Simple stuff, I’m sure Wiki is fine, and that’s how most of my medical colleagues use it.
One massive advantage that wiki/google has over legit licensed sources is that access is easy – bigger in fact than price – and expedience of the search engine. I think this is really over-looked. At my institution – a large academic one – it is cumbersome to get to uptodate even, and sources like statref! have crappy search functions. A few extra clicks may seem trivial, but those clicks add up over the course of a long day spent, sadly, on a computer.
The funny thing is, the more doctors use wikipedia, the more accurate it gets, simply because there are more people confirming the information.
Bad information can glide by when it’s not seen, but if a page is constantly observed, it’s harder to maliciously manipulate simply because someone will see.
By no means is wikipedia authoritative or detailed enough for doctors. But it’s a great starting point for information. additionally, wikipedia is the major resourse patients are using to learn about diseases. For that reason alone, doctors should at least be actively monitoring wikipedia- in order to ensure correct information, and to understand what information patients have available to them.
“50 percent of physicians who go online for professional reasons use Wikipedia to answer health questions”
Kind of a useless statistic right there. It would be nice to know what percentage of their searches were on Wikipedia, and what they were looking up. The last time I looked something medical up on Wikipedia, it was because I wanted a one-sentence answer (”17-OH-progesterone is used to prevent pre-term labor.”)
Most of the time, I use UpToDate or an even better source, but I would fall into that 50%, because I’ve done it before. If a physician uses it for actual clinical recommendations, then yes, that’s pathetic.
What’s most interesting about this report is that it’s hard to find any physicians denying it!
Maybe they are too busy consulting Wikipedia, the new standard of care.
I’m going to Wikipedia and see what they say about plantars warts right this second.
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