Increasingly, Americans are becoming their own doctors, by going online to diagnose their symptoms, order home health tests or medical devices, or even self-treat their illnesses with drugs from Internet pharmacies . Some avoid doctors because of the high cost of medical care, especially if they lack health insurance. Or they may stay because they find it embarrassing to discuss their weight, alcohol consumption or couch potato habits. Patients may a1so fear what they might learn about their health, or they distrust physicians because of negative experiences in the past. But p1aying doctor can also be a deadly game. Every day, more than six million Americans turn to the Internet for medical answers ---most of them aren't nearly skeptical enough of what they find. A 2002 survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 72 percent of those surveyed believe all or most of what they read on health websites. They shouldn't. Look up "headache", and the chances of finding reliable and complete information, free from a motivation for commercial gain, are only one in ten, reports an April 2005 Brown Medical School study. Of the l69 websites the researchers rated, only l6 scored as "high quality". Recent studies found faulty facts about all sorts of other disorders, causing one research team to warn that a large amount of incomplete, inaccurate and even dangerous information exists on the Internet. The problem is that most people don't know the safe way to surf the Web. "They use a search engine 1ike Google, get l8 trillion choices and start clicking. But that's risky, because almost anybody can put up a site that looks authoritative , so it's hard to know Whether What you're reading is reasonable or not," says Dr.Sarah Bass from the National Cancer Institute. According to the study of Brown Medical School  _  .
more than 6 million Americans distrust doctors only 1/l0 of medical websites aim to make a profit about l/10 of the websites surveyed are of high quality 72% of health websites offer incomplete and faulty facts