[Air-l] Legitimacy of E-Health Medical Information

[Suzie Allard]

> Has anybody researched the area of legitimacy of medical information in
> online healthcare support communities?

At U of Kentucky, we just held our biennial Kentucky Conference on Health
Communication and this year's theme was "Trends and Issues in Cancer
Communication".  The top student paper addressed some of your questions.
The paper was "Knowledge is Power: Information Seeking of Internet Cancer
Support Group Members" authored by Tamar Ginossar from the University of New
Mexico.  

The other person who may have some information for you is Dr. Gary Schwitzer
at the University of Minnesota.  He has expertise in online patient
decision-making tools and when he and I talked he mentioned other types of
online support communities.

Additionally, our college dean here at UK, Dr. J. David Johnson, has done
extensive work on cancer-related information seeking and how people find
information and how valuable that information is.

Also, perhaps some of the links at the National Cancer Institute's health
comm site might be useful too --
http://dccps.nci.nih.gov/hcirb/resources.html

If you would like more contact information, please feel free to reach me
off-list. 

regards,
Suzie


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Suzie Allard, KY Opportunity Fellow
University of Kentucky   (859)257-3771
College of Communications and Information Studies
520 King Library South, Lexington, KY  40506-0039
e-mail: slalla0 at uky.edu
homepage: http://sweb.uky.edu/~slalla0/
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