2001 Volume 21 Issue 6 Pages 435-443
Recently, the rapid spread of information technology (IT) made it general to use Internet (IN) in medical area. However in Japan, Web-based information has been virtually free from any regulations or evaluations that the usefulness of IN as a presenting tool of a secondary source is not clear. Thus we examined convenience and reliability of IN through actual retrieval of medical information for specialists. We performed experimental retrieval on the assumption that we faced with a situation to frame a medication guideline for elderly with myocardial infarction. Information retrieval performed by using 6 kinds of search engines and 4 terms. Consequently, instead of careful selection of SE and terms for retrieval, there were plenty of inappropriate or redundant sites (noise) in results. Moreover, there was a problem also in the reproducibility of reference. In addition, the Web-sites without the clear statement of four items: “producer’s name,” “information basis,” “creation date or revised date,” and “references” of the site occupied 75%. On the other hand, the site offered medical information with four items occupied less than 10% of all. As mentioned above, at least in collection of special medical information, IN should be used after understanding this fact in clinical practical use because the convenience of the IN is still low and it is difficult to judge informational reliability in many Websites.
