Types of Information Available on the Internet from Disorders Commonly in the News

Abstract

Types of Information Available on the Internet From Disorders Commonly in the News.Background: Recently two prominent members of the media and a retired basketball player have been diagnosed with myelodysplasia (MDS), multiple myeloma, and chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) respectively. These conditions have therefore received a lot of media attention. Due to this, it is likely that people at home will have increased curiosity and be more likely to seek out information on these conditions on the internet. This could in turn lead to misinformation or provide biased information to patients. We therefore decided to perform searches to determine the type of information patients are receiving.Methods: Google.com is the most commonly used search engine in the world1. We conducted all searches via this engine. 75% of the time, people do not search beyond the first page of results.2 However, we opted to search the first three pages. The search terms "CML", "MDS" and multiple myeloma were used. When reading newspaper articles and internet journals, the acronyms were more commonly used throughout the reports, so only the acronyms were used for CML and MDS exclusively. Both sponsored and unsponsored results were considered. Results were then broken into individual categories for the results. For the unsponsored results, nearly all results could be broken into "level one evidence", "patient support", "cancer center advertisements", and "unrelated". For sponsored results, the categories included "pharmaceutical company", "cancer center advertisement", "patient support", "alternative therapies", "additional search engines", and "unrelated".Results: Results for each individual search are as below1. CMLa. Sponsored:i. Pharmaceutical company: 3/25ii. Cancer center advertisement: 4/25iii. Patient support: 8/25iv. Additional search engine: 6/25v. Alternative care: 3/25vi. Unrelated: 1/25b. Unsponsored:i. Level one evidence: 10/29ii. Patient support: 8/29iii. Cancer center advertisement: 0/29iv. Unrelated: 11/292. MDSa. Sponsored:i. Pharmaceutical company: 0/15ii. Cancer center advertisement: 0/15iii. Patient support: 3/15iv. Additional search engine: 4/15v. Alternative care: 2/15vi. Unrelated: 6/15b. Unsponsored:i. Level one evidence: 4/29ii. Patient support: 4/29iii. Cancer center advertisement: 1/29iv. Unrelated: 20/293. Multiple myelomaa. Sponsoredi. Pharmaceutical company: 10/32ii. Cancer center advertisement: 6/32iii. Patient support: 8/32iv. Additional search engine: 3/32v. Alternative care: 2/32vi. Unrelated: 3/32b. Unsponsoredi. Level one evidence: 9/28ii. Patient support: 13/28iii. Cancer center advertisement: 5/28iv. Unrelated: 1/284. Totals:a. Sponsoredi. Pharmaceutical company: 13/72ii. Cancer center advertisement: 10/72iii. Patient support: 19/72iv. Additional search engine: 13/72v. Alternative care: 7/72b. Unsponsoredi. Level one evidence: 23/86ii. Patient support: 25/86iii. Cancer center advertisement: 6/86iv. Unrelated: 32/86Two results from myeloma count not be put into these categories and were excluded from the results.Conclusion: Excluding the sponsored results, the information available to patients appears to be mostly patient support or provides level one evidence. However, the results of MDS were often not related to myelodysplasia, which can be confusing to less savvy internet users. Alternative care was only mentioned in the sponsored results. The information available from other search engines that were linked to sponsored results were not looked at at this time. Patients can find useful information on routine internet searches.