Web Chats Help the Chronically Ill

Stephen Samuel writes "Both the CBC and the BBC are reporting on the results of a survey which found that along with an informative, up-to-date, and non-commercialized site, chat-rooms are crucial to the health and well-being of chronically ill patients being provided with 'interactive health communication applications'. Read the original summary of the report (PDF), or google's HTML translation of same" From the BBC article: "The researchers found such sites have largely positive effects on users, making them feel better informed and more socially supported. Overall, people who used such sites appeared to see improvements in the way they looked after their health and in their clinical condition. They also had improved self-efficacy - a person's belief in their ability to carry out potentially-beneficial actions. "

Comments

Oh, we're all connected, all the time

[glomph]

You'll never walk (or do anything else) alone! http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/23/technology/23col lege.html?emc=eta1

Trustworthiness

[cagle_.25]

FTA,

"Be deemed trustworthy, both immediately and on subsequent or return visits. A site can establish its trustworthiness by: being accurate having no commercial links being authored or sponsored by a known trustworthy organisation (e.g. the NHS, a local hospital or well-known university) not displaying advertisements. Trust has to be maintained, and can be lost if the site is not updated regularly.

This turns out to be the most important characteristic. My wife sees patients all the time whose parents have "diagnosed" them based on web info. The web info is usually designed to undermine the trust in the patient's primary care doc by appealing to knowledge that the "medical community has surpressed." The only way to win here is for docs to have information that is both accurate and *viewed* as accurate out there on the web, for free.