MRSA Notes

Steve Rubel has a very interesting post from yesterday referencing a study (by PewInternet.org) of how people search for medical information on the internet. The biggest concerns were that people were finding their information from outdated and unreliable sources.

Just 15% of health seekers say they “always” check the source and date of the health information they find online, while another 10% say they do so “most of the time.” Fully three-quarters of health seekers say they check the source and date “only sometimes,” “hardly ever,” or “never,” which translates to about 85 million Americans gathering health advice online without consistently examining the quality indicators of the information they find.

What I want you to take out of this, and what I try to stress, is that it is so important to learn about your specific medical condition (in this case, MRSA), but take what you have learned and discuss it with your doctor. Read as many different sources as you can, do not rely on one source as the be all and end all. Print out the information if you need to, but let your doctor know that you are interested, and hopefully he/she will help you separate the wheat from the chaff.

Almost all of the things I learned about MRSA when my husband was sick were from the internet. At that time there were almost no places online that were dedicated to MRSA, and so it was a feat to get the information I needed. I wrote down everything the doctors said, and researched it all - from drug names to tests they were running, and followed links from there to learn all I could. I had a notebook of print outs that was 2 inches thick, but I think through all the research, I did manage to get the big picture. I hope you will too.

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