50 Great Tools to Double Check Your Doctor or Not? September 1, 2009
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health, Health 2.0, Web 2.0.trackback
I received an e-mail about a new post featuring 50 Great Tools to Double Check Your Doctor. I shared it on Twitter as it looked nice. Later, Laikas took a deeper look at it.
Well here are some features I’ve noticed (for the spam sites in “my”field)
- All the sites that publicized such list were educational, mostly directed at nurses or other health practitioners. Some even end at org.
- All sites have a Quick-degree, nursing degree, technician school etc finder. Mostly it is the only information at the ABOUT-section (?!)
- The home page often contains prominent links (clicks) to Kaplan University, University of Phoenix, Grand Canyon University, and/or others.
- People behind the site often approach you actively (below are some examples) to gain your interest.
- It is unclear how the lists are made and who is behind it.
- There is no real information, only lists and degree finders.
So spread the word! Be careful with those list. DON’T LINK TO THEM! And if you see a possible interesting list, first CHECK the site: WHO, WHY, WHAT, WHERE AND WHEN. Once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all!
Conclusion? We all should double check these websites not our doctors…
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The lack of transparency is the issue here. Much harder for a user to follow-up on a tweet to verify its transparency, accuracy, than to check on a web site and even that is not a common behavior…Lack of transparency in tweets begins with the identity of the tweeter and follows with the honesty of the tweets themselves. Creating a HONCode type commitment for twitter accounts would be a good thing. Those sites that already are HON-certified and which twitter, such as yours and mine would benefit their followers, for example. Otherwise, if we look to create a new method, we’ll lose a few years. My two centimes!
Thank you Berci for mentioning my post and warning your readers for these kind of top 50/100 lists, which are really treacherous.
But, huh, perhaps it would be better if you didn’t LINK to them.
Jacqueline
What Jacqueline said. Remove the link, Berci.