Just saw this piece in the New York Times entitled “You’re Sick. Now What? Knowledge Is Power.” The lede: “Are patients swimming in a sea of health information? Or are they drowning in it?”
No earth-shattering revelations, but a sober reminder that, for all of the health information available on the web, we still have a major information access problem. Information availability is clearly not the same as information accessibility.
The Noisy Channel 
2 replies on “The Sea of Health Information”
My take away was the need to enable the non-expert to find information / doctor that you can know and trust.
“We need to help them sort through it, not discourage the use of information…”
LikeLike
Definitely. I tend to harp on people thinking that having more information stored / indexed amounts to making it findable. While that’s obvious to anyone who works in our area, it doesn’t seem obvious to the population at large. It wasn’t that long ago that web search engines competed on index size. Perhaps they still do: Cuil launched at “the world’s biggest search engine.”
LikeLike