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Chapter 8 - Using the Internet to Educate on Sex and Pregnancy

Grading Internet Information

from Section 1 - General Issues

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2022

By
Noa Gilad ,
Yariv Yogev  and
Michael Lavie
Edited by
Dan Farine  and
Pablo Tobías González
Dan Farine
Affiliation:
Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto
Pablo Tobías González
Affiliation:
Hospital Universitario Infanta Cristina de Parla, Madrid
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Summary

The vast expansion of data via the Internet did not overlook health and healthcare information. However, lack of supervision, the amount of data, and misleading information online has a profound impact on the health of patients themselves and on the quality and efficiency of healthcare. Many pregnant women utilize the Internet as a major source of information and use the unsupervised information to navigate pregnancy and fertility-related decisions due to its accessibility. The Internet has become a major information tool for obstetricians and gynecologists as well, with over 90% of physicians using it on a daily basis. In addition, any physician needs to know what are the trends in the media and to address them accordingly when confronted by a patient. We describe the essential steps when searching online in order to find the most reliable information: (1) consider the source, by verifying the credentials of and information about the authors; (2) focus on quality, by using only peer-reviewed published data; (3) consider website funding, by distinguishing advertisements from health information; (4) protect your privacy and personal information; and (5) there are no magical solutions, so suspect websites or companies that claim dramatic results and which seem too good to be true.

Keywords

Internethealth informationpregnancy datafertility datasearching guidelines
Type
Chapter
Information
Sex and Pregnancy
From Evidence-Based Medicine to Dr Google
 , pp. 49 - 54
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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