Surfing instructors: Teaching how to hang ten over medicine on the Internet.

One doctor has set up a college course to teach consumers about how to evaluate medical Web sites.

By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. Oct. 8, 2001.

Whenever Kathryn Ball accesses medical information on the Internet, she critically assesses whether the information is reliable by going through a mental checklist she learned from a community college class taught by Darol Joseff, MD.

"One of the things Darol talked about was how to evaluate the information once you get it," Ball said. "He said to look at the source of the information, who wrote the article, who paid for it to be written, and that was really helpful in terms of evaluating it. The class also helps when I go see my doctor because it helps me clear up what is real and what isn't real so when I go in and talk to him, I can be more specific and not waste his time and mine."

The class Dr. Joseff, the Santa Barbara, Calif., nephrologist teaches is one of the few college courses in the country, perhaps the only one, that instructs consumers on how to find health information online and judge its reliability. Hospitals and patient advocacy groups occasionally hold workshops teaching patients how to find disease-specific information, but not how to evaluate it.

Few, if any of those workshops, are taught by a physician, as is the case with the adult education course offered by Santa Barbara City College. Dr. Joseff teaches that course, called "Finding Health Information Via the Internet," with medical librarian Lucy Thomas and patient advocate Nancy Oster.

The involvement of a physician gives the class more credibility and makes it more valuable to students, Oster said.

She and her co-instructors knew each other before deciding to teach the course in 1997 at the request of Santa Barbara City College. The year before, the college had sponsored a Women and Wellness Day workshop addressing various topics, including a session led by Thomas and Oster on how to find medical information online. [...]