The cyber doctor will see you now
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 ...patients, but it should be regulated. "It's just absurd, this whole freedom of speech thing."

“It’s okay to lie to people?”

A few organizations, such as URAC and HONcode, currently rate health Web sites in an attempt to inform consumers about information quality without taking away an individual’s freedom to post information online. Neither organization, however, vouches for the reliability of the information on the sites they approve. Nicolas Terry, a professor of law and co-director of the Center for Health Law Studies at St. Louis University, is skeptical about the efficacy of these rating systems. The Web is dynamic, changing constantly. Rating organizations claim to periodically review approved sites, but they cannot constantly keep tabs on them.

Without effective guidelines or widely used rating systems as recourse, individual providers and larger health care organizations, such as Kaiser Permanente, are taking the problem of Internet misinformation into their own hands. More than 80 percent of patients who use the Web use it as a supplement, not a substitute, for visits to their health-care provider, according to Pew. As a result, patients can use face-to-face visits to discuss material they have found, as Bob Staib does, and their doctor can help them distinguish between accurate and inaccurate information. The American Medical Association recommends that Internet users treat information on the Web with the same skepticism they treat print publications. Patients should pay attention to the source of the information, citation of references, disclosure of competing interests, and timeliness of the information. Currently, however, one-half of Internet users ignore these important cues, Pew reported.

Doctors, such as those at the Mayo Clinic, are also trying to police Internet health information by posting health material on their own Web sites. This movement would increase the availability of Web health care information already vetted for content. Commenting on this trend, Dr. Daniel Sands, a professor at Harvard Medical School, said, “I hope in five years we get to the point where it is malpractice to practice without electronic technology.”