<i>SLATER AND ZIMMERMAN RESPOND</i>

A study of Web site listings in response to common health queries finds that even people with graduate-level scientific training may find superficially plausible pseudoscientific health claims persuasive and that the presence or absence of citations for such claims may make little difference.

Abstract

We appreciate Melnick’s kind letter regarding our study of Web site listings in response to common health queries, and we appreciate as well the opportunity it affords to elaborate on some of the significant problems and opportunities afforded by the Internet. Recent surveys indicate that between 40% and 80% of adult American Internet users access health information on the Internet.1,2 The Internet has already influenced the provider–patient relationship, as patients arrive armed with information or misinformation from Internet sources.3 In such clinical contexts, trained medical personnel have the opportunity to help consumers interpret the information they have received. More worrisome, as Melnick suggests, is the prospect of consumer decisions regarding lifestyle, diet, supplements, and treatment being made on the basis of information from problematic Internet sites. For example, we found in a pilot study that even people with graduate-level scientific training may find superficially plausible pseudoscientific health claims persuasive and that the presence or absence of citations for such claims may make little difference.4 The Internet offers the public health community an unprecedented opportunity to cultivate informed and knowledgeable health consumers. The Internet also poses a significant challenge: inaccurate, self-interested, misleading, or outdated information may be as accessible and as superficially credible to lay consumers as is science-based medical knowledge. Finding ways to direct health consumers to credible Internet sources, working to increase consumers’ ability to assess the credibility of health information they do find on the Internet, and striving to make existing credible, objective sources more accessible and appealing to the consumer should be increasingly pressing public health priorities, as reflected in Healthy People 2010 objectives.5