As we keep saying, there are already hundreds of websites on the world wide web claiming to provide the latest and best information on matters medical and these numbers are increasing all the time. And we have no doubt that these websites will increasingly be regarded as the best source, perhaps in practice the only source, of this information, for us health care services consumers AND for doctors.
But to us there is an enigma. It’s seems universally the case, with every such website, that their information is difficult to access, requiring considerable time and trouble to do so – this, when the technology exists to make it so quick and easy.
An example which is typical is the Australian Governments website – www.healthdirect.gov.au
On the one hand it claims to provide, “Free Australian health advice you can count on,” (such sites usually use the words “trust” and “trusted,”) and on the other it states, in relation to an email form it has, (it doesn’t have an ordinary email address,) “Please be advised that requests for specific health advice or support through this form will not be provided.”
To us this amounts to saying, “On our website is all the health advice and information you could ever want, but don’t expect any help from us in finding it.” It’s almost as if they deliberately set out to make finding their health advice and information time consuming and difficult.
And this is only typical of all the hundreds such websites on the world wide web. They obviously have agendas other than to make their
What is going on?
Let us suppose that someone has this problem, as one of our readers did recently – “I’ve recently been advised that I have a fatty liver. Are there any tests to tell me how fatty it is.”
How easy would it be to send this question off to someone in an ordinary email address to get the latest and best information on it in a reply. As our reader reported, he asked this question of a GP recently, and he had no idea!!! And, of even greater concern, he obviously had no idea how to find out either.
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