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Evaluating and Using the Information You Find

By Arlene F. Harder, MA, MFT

Look for the HON Seal of Approval

One of the better ways to evaluate health information comes from the Health on the Net Foundation (HON), a nonprofit organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, that monitors medical Web sites to make sure they are dispensing credible, accurate information. On their website you can read their code of conduct and search its database for sites that meet the foundation's standards. This is what it should look like.

We subscribe to the HONcode principles of the Health On the Net Foundation

E-mail the Webmaster for Background Information

Another way you can know who or what is behind a particular website is to write to the webmaster. If you don't get an answer, that may tell you something. However, to receive an answer, you will have to remember something VERY IMPORTANT. If you don't have your e-mail return address configured accurately, you won't be able to get an answer!

Far too often we receive an e-mail request and spend time on answering it, only to have it returned as "User Can't Be Found." This is very frustrating to both us and the person asking for information. So, make certain your e-mail addresses are correct before accusing the website of not caring.

Taking Clinical Articles to Your Doctors

When you research a disease on the Internet, you can read, and print out, a number of complete medical journals, such as those published at Medscape, which are available by simply registering for free. However, you will find hundreds of abstracts on that site, on other sites, and while using PubMed (described in Medical Search Engines). To get a full copy of the article on which the abstract is based, contact a college, university, or even a large city library near you. There will usually be a small fee and you may have to wait a few days, but in the end you'll have expanded your knowledge about the disease you're researching..

Reading these professional journal articles can be stimulating and may suggest new possibilities of treatment, but it's not always easy to interpret them, because they are written in the jargon of the medical profession. That's why it's important to discuss this information with your doctors. Even if you can talk "medicalese" and understand clinical research, print everything you feel is relevant to your situation and take it to your doctor.

Incidentally, if you want to be sure there is time to discuss new information with him or her, let the office know and they can try to schedule a little extra time. You can't expect to plop a bunch of articles on a doctor's desk and expect him or her to thoroughly evaluate them at that visit. You may need to leave some things at the office and return a few days later.

It's true, of course, that some doctors are skeptical of patients who arrive with armloads of downloaded material. Increasingly, however, the medical profession is beginning to appreciate the value of online resources. More than one patient has found a treatment that leads to a cure their doctor didn't know about. If nothing else, in discussing with your doctor what you discover online, you can feel more assured that the course you're taking is the best treatment for you.

Printing From Your Screen

You will probably want to print out journal articles and a lot of other material by simply hitting the Print command, getting a copy that looks like it does on the screen, including graphics if your printer handles pictures or no graphics if you can turn off that feature However, some articles are written in large font size so they can be read more easily on the screen. Printing them, therefore, can take an awfully lot of paper, especially since you will probably want to make two copies, one for you and one for the doctor.

Further, if web pages have an index that goes down only part way on one side of the page, you can end up with a l-o-n-g, t-h-i-n article covering many pages with lots of white space on the page. There are two tricks to printing such articles most efficiently.

Make the Text Size Smaller

Use the font size on your Internet browser and choose a smaller size. This will reduce the size of the text and you can print directly from the screen. Of course, you won't be able to reduce large graphics.

Print Just the First Page

If you've ever printed an article that spewed out dozens of pages you didn't need or if you only want one page to remind you of material you might read later, be sure to make an estimate of the number of paper pages (8 1/2 by 11) an Internet "page" will print. For example, on this particular page it takes seven clicks in the right scroll bar to get to the bottom, which translates to about six pieces of standard paper. A page that takes twenty clicks, therefore, may use up more paper than you would like to devote to that topic. So when you open the print box, be sure to tell it to print page 1 of 1. If you don't do that, the entire article will print, page after page after page.

Downloading to Your Computer for More Efficient Printing

What happens if you want the entire article and it will require a lot of paper if printed directly from the screen because of the way it is formatted?. In this case, there are three ways to print more efficiently.

1. Download the material to your computer and open it with your word processor. Then you can adjust the print size or print out just those parts of the article in which you are most interested or most need to share with the doctor.

2. Select a section of an online article, copy it, and then paste it onto a page in a word program. You can select the text by (1) clicking the cursor at the left of a paragraph and then holding the cursor down as you move down the page and select the amount of text you want, or (2) clicking the cursor at the start of a paragraph, taking your finger off the mouse, scrolling down to the bottom of the text area you want to select, and then, with the shift key held down, click the cursor again.

Either of these methods will turn the background dark, indicating it is selected. (Note, however, that you can't copy text that is imbedded in graphics.) Then choose copy from the Edit menu. (I do this step twice because, for some reason I can't figure out, copying once sometimes doesn't work.) Then with the copied text hidden in your "clipboard," open a word document and paste. Viola! Now you can play with the text in any way you wish.

3. If the material on a website comes from a book, you might want to read some of it on your computer's screen and then buy the book if it contains valuable information. For example, there is an excellent book called Choices in Healing: Integrating the Best of Conventional and Complementary Approaches to Healing. You can read it on the website of Commonweal. However, the book is more than six hundred pages and some chapters are more than fifty pages long. You are probably better off buying a paperback copy.

So don't forget, skim an article before hitting the print command. Some will be longer than you want to print from the Internet, others can be printed from your word processor, and you may discover that others aren't worth printing. And if you want to learn how to handle a strange printing problem, be sure to read Solving a Peculiar Printing Problem.

A VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: As an author and editor, I feel it is important to remind you: don't forget the copyright. One of the dangers of playing with Internet text in the methods I've just demonstrated is the casual way in which copy that someone has taken a long time to research and write can get sent around the Internet via e-mail without reference to the author. Please be sure to include who owns the copyright of whatever it is you copy and print.

© Copyright 1998, Revised 2002, Arlene F. Harder, MA, MFT