Previously, I urged readers to use the internet for information about health conditions, medications, and other medical concerns to help make informed decisions about their care. I must modify this based on an online search experience I had that yielded mostly garbage. If I had not known what to seek, I would have been confused, ended my search prematurely, as I expect most people would have, and learned nothing.
To simplify searches on conditions, I suggest examining the online resources published by major medical centers. Institutions such as Johns Hopkins Medicine or Cleveland Clinic are excellent starting points. They are easy to read, sufficiently comprehensive, accurate, and trustworthy.
If you want greater detail, Clinical Pearls from the National Institutes of Health can be helpful. They are exceptionally detailed, accurate, and dependable. If you base your decisions on numbers and percentages, you will find them here. They are written for medical professionals and can be difficult to read.
Managing your medications safely
Given today’s fragmented care, the clinicians you visit are likely to be unfamiliar with all of your medications and conditions. Take a current list of your drugs, including nonprescription ones, and diagnoses to every medical visit. If a new medication is recommended, give him or her the list and ask if it will be a problem with any of the medications or conditions on it. This can save you from purchasing a new medication only to discover you cannot take it.
It is unreasonable to expect a clinician to keep current and remember all the frequent advances in medicine as they occur rapidly. Changes that used to happen over years now occur in months. Before you pick up a new medicine, go to Drugs.com. This site provides more information and is more readable than drug inserts and offers more accurate indications of possible side effects. It will also help you determine if a medication should not be used with any of your current medications or if you have specific medical conditions.
If either of these occurs, contact your prescribing physician and discuss this issue, and ask about alternatives that are more benign. If he or she decides on a different drug, they can cancel the first one and save you having to pay for it.
Recognizing medical misinformation and disguised advertising
You should actively avoid several sources of unreliable health information:
Mailed newsletters. Avoid mailed medical center or disease-specific organization newsletters. Their comments are brief, nonspecific, and overly optimistic. Both types of organizations receive money from pharmaceutical developers, and articles are written for the companies, not for consumers. For example, Biogen, the manufacturer of the Alzheimer’s drug Adulhelm, paid the Alzheimer’s Association approximately $4 million to lobby the FDA to approve the medicine and to promote it in their newsletter, but it resulted in more harm than good.
Office brochures. Your clinician’s office will have informational brochures. These provide limited information and can be advertising if sponsored by a company. If a health department produces brochures or information sheets, they can be more neutral and trustworthy. But health departments can also be limited in what they can write because of federal and state regulations based on pseudoscience or no science at all, but on legislators’ misbeliefs.
Disguised magazine advertisements. You should also avoid articles written by companies that may be in health-related or other magazines, as they are cleverly disguised ads to sell treatments or cures that “doctors will not tell you about” or contain “a proprietary or secret ingredient.” They are written in scientific-sounding jargon, for example, medical-grade oxygen or vibrational therapy, mention clinical studies without evidence of their publication, and feature glowing testimonials. These are sophisticated marketing tools designed to make you believe the product is scientifically established when it is not. They may claim FDA review and can contain harmful substances or ones that can interact negatively with your medications.
Anti-science websites. There are also websites written by individuals or organizations with an anti-science perspective that provide misinformation about modern medicine and suggest unconventional beliefs and treatments. Examples include claims that routine childhood vaccines cause autism or kill more children than they save, suggestions that it is better to expose children to measles to establish their immunity while failing to mention the dangers of the illness, or touting the advantages of unpasteurized milk while ignoring the diseases it carries. These sites are dangerous and should be avoided. Sadly, the CDC and FDA must be considered unreliable sources under the present administration.
AI and social media. Also unreliable presently are AI summaries and searches, and anything on social media. Multiple examinations of the information they provide have found significant inaccuracies.
Before purchasing questionable products or trusting unusual claims, check the product’s credibility or that of the company on Quackwatch.com, a highly reliable source of information. Professional medical associations are also helpful resources for verification.
The systemic challenges of modern medicine
Modern medicine has problems, but conflicting information, a common public complaint, is not one of them. This is how science develops, as contradictory results necessitate further research. Medicine’s problems do not lie with science or technology, but from its commodification, the minimal control and regulation of for-profit entities, and the temptation and ease with which they place profit over patients and commit fraud. Politicization unrelated to safety or ethical practices is also a significant impediment.
Additionally, despite overwhelming evidence of the effects of environmental elements on health, profit again takes precedence over people. Any attempt to limit pollutants requires years, even decades, of concerted effort. Pollution is a global problem, and many governments, including ours presently, care less about their citizens and more about appeasing the wealthy.
M. Bennet Broner is a medical ethicist.
