() Comments
Competing Voices: In a sea of medical information, where do you find answers?
By David Steinkraus
I walked into a local drug store a couple of weeks ago, and in one aisle a middle-aged woman was standing near the antacids talking to a clerk about her father's health problem. She asked a question, and the clerk replied, "Well, I'm not a doctor." And their conversation went on, but it was obvious that the woman needed some answers and wasn't finding them anywhere else.
If your health-care provider isn't answering your questions, if you just can't grasp what you're being told, you will find yourself looking for other sources of information, like the woman in the drug store. Somehow you have to cull something understandable from the pile of information on the Internet and the gaggle of voices screaming for attention. Yet it's not that hard. The secret (which really isn't one) is knowing where and how to look.
Where to go Where you start, and how, very much depends on how you learn and what you want. General searches aren't necessarily best. Using Google to search the Internet isn't always the best strategy.
"Most people want to know functional information: How do I get through the day with this problem?" said Patricia Flatley Brennan. She is the Moehlman Bascom professor of the School of Nursing and Industrial Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and specializes in designing the computer tools people need so they can find information for taking care of themselves.
"I think, by and large, information searching and retrieval is not a human skill, Brennan said. "It's not an intuitive skill. It's something you learn. And so my guess is that ... a person who's brand new, who's just starting off on a topic, is best off being guided in the search of that topic by someone who understands searching."
You can go it alone, but if you do, remember the librarians' rule of thumb: If you've spent 15 or 20 minutes on a search, and you're not finding anything, you probably won't, and it's time to ask for help.
While a public library wouldn't be her first choice for detailed medical information, it should be first choice for basic information, or for starting a search, Brennan said. "Because (public librarians') skill is having a general fund of knowledge and understanding and accessing information across a broad range of fields, they are quite good at acquiring access to information."
That's not to say librarians are qualified to give medical advice. "We're information professionals, not health care professionals," Papa said. So when you ask a librarian for help, it will help you if you know the correct spelling of the condition or disease you're looking for information about.
"I guess I would start with what was most convenient for me, and if I needed more in-depth, I would go to a special/medical library," wrote Mary Blackwelder, director of the Medical College of Wisconsin Libraries in Wauwatosa, in an e-mail interview. It would depend on the question, of course, but she wrote that she'd start a search on the Internet.
"The Web is usually faster as a starting point. But Web sites may refer a user to books or information contained in books." Web sites may have more current information, she wrote, because books are limited by what was known at the time of publication, and knowledge is advancing rapidly so procedures and therapies used only four of five years ago may have changed as knowledge advances.
"Sometimes there's nothing like looking at a book and seeing things in context," Papa said.
In any case, and especially in the case of an Internet search, you need to make sure the information you have is valid. (See the accompanying box for how to do this.) A good rule for an Internet search is to pay more attention to dot-gov or dot-edu sites (from government and educational institutions, respectively) because they are less likely to be biased. That is not to say you should ignore the commercial, or .com, sites.
"There are some excellent dot-com sites," Brennan said. "They're companies, but they put out really stellar information, particularly pharmaceutical firms. But they'll put out information about their drugs, so there's subtle social marketing that occurs, but that subtle social marketing occurs on the government sites as well on the dot-edu sites. So I guess," she said with a chuckle, "it depends on whose social marketing you're willing to buy into."
Going inside The All Saints library is in St. Mary's Hospital, near the gift shop. Inside you will find, for example, a model of the human eye, a book on the biology of aging, basic information in the Mayo Clinic family health guide, the Diagnostic Standards Manual which classifies mental diseases, other very technical books, and about 80 medical journals lining the shelves. There are also computer terminals that provide access to more than 500 medical journals electronically and all the other resources of the Internet. Plus, there's a staff who can help you search.
Afterward When you're done, you will, hopefully, have a stack of information.
"Talk to your provider about any information you find, and remember that medical information found in books, on Web sites, and in journal articles, is just that - information. It is not medical advice," Blackwelder wrote.
"Although the information itself may be very valid, there may be reasons why it does not apply in a particular case, and the health-care provider will be able to explain this to a person. Good providers welcome questions and information from their patients."
To do that, Brennan said, set up a separate appointment with your provider to do nothing but talk about the information you've found. Occasionally, Papa said, people using the All Saints library will ask that their physicians receive copies of their findings.
Experience Racine resident Belinda Cronin found herself in need of help a couple of years ago. A fall in 2003, on top of some lingering health problems such as fibromyalgia, prevented her from continuing as principal at Bain Elementary School in Kenosha. She was advised that her future lay with a walker and a cane.
"I thought `I can't live the rest of my life like this,' " Cronin said. "My goal was to resist becoming dependent on the walker and the cane."
She said she looked for information first in the Racine and Kenosha public libraries but found some of the material a couple of years out of date. "And so you were wondering what's out there that's new and what alternatives have developed, too."
Then she attended a class on medical information at the All Saints library. She went back for two more, one for a group of blacks to learn about the health problems particular to their race, and she's done research there on her own and with help from the staff.
Especially valuable, she said, was learning about what sites provided good information because those sites led her to other sites that changed her life through, for example, better cooking.
"So when I cook soul food, I use chicken stock as a base," Cronin said. That's instead of ham hocks and the attendant fat that cooking them adds to food. "I don't fry foods half as much as I used to."
She's lost 70 pounds since leaving work. She took tai chi to strengthen her body, exercises in a pool three times a week, and is looking forward to taking up bicycle riding when the weather permits. Now she's looking forward to doing more research for a friend with cervical cancer and another friend with prostate cancer.
"You can continue to learn," she said, "and certainly we're going to need to learn more about our health."
Special Offer: Get 5 Weeks of the Journal Times for $7!
|
 |
|
| Health and Fitness File | Competing Voices: Remember this one |
