Health: What my Doctor didn’t tell me

So how useful is the internet in finding out more information about a diagnosis or managing an existing illness? Entering the search term Cancer immediatetly brings up a result from Wikipedia, which gives readers a comprehensive user generated summary of the disease. Google also lists The American Cancer Institute, these results are generally too broad and not local enough to consider as a useful site. When entering the search term Cancer Australia, the search brings up a more relevant list including Cancer Australia which is a government agency that provides the public with information on support and about the disease and the most reputable and well known Cancer charity, The Cancer Council. The list is followed by organisations that deal with more specific types of cancer such as breast cancer and prostate cancer.

I would narrow my selecion to include the sites that have easily accessible web 2.0 applications and social networking capacities such as twitter and facebook, so I can recieve regular updates in regards to developments or socia/supportl activities taking place and ones recomended by medical proffessionals and health authorities which for the large part has been the largest domain of information available on the internet to date. These are reffered to as intermediary sites, where medical middlemen offer to provide users with information. The Cancer Council and Cancer Australia websites are examples of these. These sites often offer the opportunity for its users to become part of a community and often encourage incoorporating usage of the site on a day to day basis. These are individualised according to the users requirements, thus providing a different and unique experience for all it’s users.

However, power is shiftting away from these intermediaries as the trend towards Apomediation increases. “Apomediation is a new socio-technological term that was coined to avoid the term “Web 2.0” in the scholarly debate [16,17]. It characterizes the “third way” for users to identify trustworthy and credible information and services.” (Eysenbach, 2008)

“for example shared bookmarking tools such as CiteULike, Connotea or WebCite, where people receive pointers to recently published relevant literature based on what others with a similar profile and interests have cited or bookmarked.”(Eysenbach, 2008)

Web 2.0 applications such as Google Health allow users to monitor and assess their progress and create health records, I find that outside of its ability to provide users with a way of monitoring their own health and creating records it doesn’t actually provide much information about the illness, although it gives an option to upload useful sites which you can refer to from this page.

I tried to create an account with Health Vault, again the application caters for users in the UK and America and I was unable to sign up with them.
The site Patients like me is specifically a social media application much like facebook, but designed specifically for networking with patients whom have the same disease.

Eysenbach, 2008, Medicine 2.0: Social Networking, Collaboration, Participation, Apomediation, and Openness http://www.jmir.org/2008/3/e22/