Online health data: At times a tangled Web

There is no dot-com bust in the number of patients seeking health information on the Internet.

Editorial. Aug. 5, 2002.

News of a blast -- well, a bust -- from the dot-com past came down the financial wires the other day. The assets of drkoop.com have been sold for $186,000, to be run by a company that sells discount vitamins.

The decline of drkoop.com, at one time valued at $1 billion, is often cited as the classic example of how health care information sites never lived up to their much-touted potential. Yet those who predicted the boom were at least half right. The money wasn't there but the visitors certainly were; they are still clicking away.

About 6 million Americans a day visit health sites, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Even drkoop.com still gets almost a million visitors a month, according to its new owner. And it is just one site among many -- probably the biggest reason behind its whittled-down net worth. There are perhaps tens of thousands of other health sites, with offerings ranging from pure quackery to truly useful information. The AMA, through health information links on its own site, and in helping start the patient-physician oriented Medem site, is doing its part to see that the best information is accessible.

More than two-thirds of those who visit health sites find that it has some impact on their own or a loved one's care, Pew reports. In about 16% of those cases, the impact was major. Yet the research project provides an interesting and troubling corollary: Half of all those who search the Web for health information "never," "hardly ever" or "only sometimes" check the source of the information or if it is up to date. [...]