Web-sites have become a leading source of information on health matters. This is particularly true in the realm of alternative medicine. Conventional health care professionals often know too little about this subject to advise their patients, and alternative practitioners are usually too biased to be trusted. So many consumers turn to the Internet and hope that it offers information which is reliable. But is it?
American pharmacists published a study evaluating the quality of on-line information on herbal supplements. They conducted a search of 13 common herbals – including black cohosh, echinacea, garlic, ginkgo, ginseng, green tea, kava, saw palmetto, and St John’s wort – and reviewed the top 50 Web sites for each using a Google search. Subsequently, they analysed clinical claims, warnings, and other safety information.
A total of 1179 Web sites were examined in this way. Less than 8% of retail sites provided information regarding potential adverse effects, drug interactions, and other safety information; only 10.5% recommended consultation with a healthcare professional. Less than 3% cited scientific literature to support their claims.
The authors’ conclusions were worrying: Key safety information is still lacking from many online sources of herbal information. Certain nonretail site types may be more reliable, but physicians and other healthcare professionals should be aware of the variable quality of these sites to help patients make more informed decisions.
Having conducted my fair share of similar research (e.g. here or here or here or here), I can only concur with these conclusions. When it comes to health care, the Internet is a scary place! In the realm of alternative medicine, it is dominated by people who seem not to care much about anything other than their profits.
But what can be done to change this situation? How can we protect the public from Internet-charlatans? How can one control the Internet? I wish I knew! But there are nevertheless means of directing consumers to those sites which do offer reliable information. Kite-marking high quality sites might be one way of achieving this. This task would, of course, be huge and difficult, but in the interest of public safety, governments and other official institutions should consider tackling it.
3 Responses to On-line information on herbal supplements is mostly rubbish
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I have been involved in reviewing the claims made by “What Doctors Don’t Tell You”, an internet-to-dead tree alternative “health” publication. The information they give varies between incomplete and grossly misleading (see http://wwddtydty.com).
The problem here is that many sites selling alternative remedies do so on an availability-only platform, leaving it to crank websites to make the extraordinary claims that drive custom.
Any action that does not control the likes of Natural News and whale.to is unlikely to be very effective.
Pope is mostly Catholic.
This misinformation, combined with the frequent contamination of herbal remedies identified by the BMJ study http://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f6138 makes self-prescription of these substances quite reckless. I wonder how many “autoimmune” type conditions seen by GPs originate from toxic “alternative remedy” treatments.