The Internet’s accessibility made various types of health information available for any person, and many consumers developed a habit to check the online sources for symptoms or primarily help before reaching out to a healthcare facility. Hospitals’ websites, forums, medical associations’ resources, scientific publications, magazines, and doctors’ or nurses’ blogs are the places where everyone can find info about diseases, treatment, and professionals’ opinions about it (Adams, 2010). The accessibility of the broad scope of knowledge is beneficial because for consumers many websites post wrong information or try to earn on people’s health concerns. It is important to educate internet users on how to evaluate online source’s trustworthiness and identify the proven and reliable healthcare websites. This paper aims to discuss the influence of health literacy on patients, medical personnel, prevention and treatment practices.
Health literacy should improve considering that many consumers became the informed patients who visit physicians and examinations with background information they gathered from online sources. I encountered clients who knew many details about their conditions and the treatment approaches for certain diseases, and their erudition did more harm than good. Indeed, they refused to go through the standard full primary examination and physicians’ decisions by mentioning what they have read online about others’ experiences with a certain disease. It is difficult to assess the reliability of the sources an informed patient studied, and their knowledge might disrupt the process of differential diagnosis leading to severe errors (American Nurses Association [ANA], 2008). Furthermore, delaying with detailed medical examination might turn a preventative illness into the chronic one (Powell et al., 2011). My facility had a patient who preferred to check forums and healthcare magazines and seriously harmed their health by self-treatment and using drugs they read about online.
Patient education is a responsibility of nursing professionals, therefore workable strategies to inform them about the use of online sources need to be developed. The quality of health information on the Internet is difficult to regulate, yet helping clients navigate to trustworthy sources is possible (ANA, 2008). Nurses can provide patients with handouts that contain reliable websites such as World Health Organization, PubMed, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Powell et al., 2011). Besides, clients must be educated about the danger of trying drugs or treatment approaches they found online even though other person’s practice was successful. Lastly, education would benefit from discussing the patient’s own experience of exploring health information online and addressing what was correct and what was not.
In my practice, most of the patients are more literate than they would be a decade ago, and it happened due to the rapid technology and Internet development and an overall trend of health awareness. However, their knowledge of the diseases’ symptoms, outcomes, and treatment disrupts the physicians’ work (Keselman et al., 2008). Indeed, many literate patients decrease their trust in doctor’s experience and level of education, ask questions before accepting treatment and compare what happens during their examination to what they read at online forums. Such difficulties in building communication with clients are the severe outcome of health literacy.
Patients do not have a fundamental medical education, therefore they tend to overuse unreliable medical websites and misinterpret the information they found online. The most beneficial strategy for the nursing practice is to explore the client’s own experience and level of health literacy to directly address their delusions and recommend proper sources. Moreover, patient education can include discussing the ethical question as the medicine exists to do no harm for an individual, and misusing or misinterpreting what is found online is against the principles. Lastly, a consumer must learn that any doubt must be proven right or wrong by a physician with submitted experience and a high level of education, thus medical websites’ information must never be taken for granted.
References
American Nurses Association. (2008). Nursing informatics: Scope and standards of practice. Silver Spring, MD.
Adams, S. A. (2010). Blog-based applications and health information: Two case studies that illustrate important questions for consumer health informatics (CHI) research.International Journal of Medical Informatics, 79(6), e89-e96.
Keselman, A., Logan, R., Arnott Smith, C., Leroy, G., & Zeng-Treitler, Q. (2008). Developing informatics tools and strategies for consumer-centered health communication. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 15(4), 473-483.
Powell, J., Inglis, N., Ronnie, J., & Large, S. (2011). The characteristics and motivations of online health information seekers: Cross-sectional survey and qualitative interview study. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 13(1), e20.