Friday, October 11, 2013

How Do I Find a Reliable Source?


     This weeks group presentation incorporated a video as well as a case study to show us what reliable web sources look like and how to find them. In their study, they described a scenario of a 60-year-old man, whom had just come home from a walk and is now experiencing excessive sweating, fatigue, trouble breathing and nausea. As apart of our small groups, we were asked to search his symptoms online and see what sources we came across. The website I first landed on was WebMD, which opened a page based on heart disease according to the symptoms I typed into Google. This website I found did turn out to be reliable according to the pointers this group had included in their presentation. These pointers include the website having an “about us” tab, expert authors, an email or number to contact them through, advertisements, funding and up to date information. These are the reasons why I am sure the website I chose for this study was highly reliable. After class, I decided to go back onto this site to see what else it offered. I found it very interesting as I saw that it incorporates a section that allows you to make your own health folder. This is where you add any symptoms you are experiencing and then the site gives you the possible conditions you may have relating to your entries.  Everything stays in your folder, which you can open up and look back on for reference. This site truly has so much to offer, so be smart when self diagnosing yourself online and check out this website! 

     My professor showed a video to the class this week, in which a man explained the importance of how online health information could save lives, including his. In his video, this man explains his story of how he was cured of kidney cancer. There were a few web sources this man described using in his search of symptoms. It was really neat to find out that he had used the same WebMD site that I had just found in class that week. 

No comments:

Post a Comment