from Reuters
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"Our current recommendation to patients is to be sceptical, make sure what they read is applicable to their specific medical well-being and not to take action without consulting a clinician," said Dr. Funda Meric-Bernstam, who led the study.

Writing in the journal Cancer, Meric-Bernstam and colleagues said they could not find an easy way to flag the inaccurate sites.

"Most consumers find online information by using general-purpose search engines rather than medical sites or portals, and most do not go beyond the first page of search results," her team wrote in the journal Cancer.

"Therefore, we used five popular search engines: Google, Yahoo Directory, Alta-Vista, Overture, and AllTheWeb to identify Web pages that consumers are likely to encounter."

They examined 343 web pages and found one in 20 had inaccuracies. They found 41 inaccurate statements on 18 of the websites, or 5.2% of sites.

Those displaying complementary and alternative medicine were 15 times more likely to contain false or misleading health information, they reported.

Meric-Bernstam said breast cancer patients often came to her well-informed, which is a good thing. "However, in contrast, there are times patients read about treatments that clearly do not apply to them, which can increase their level of anxiety or expectations for a treatment that they are not a candidate for," she said in a statement.

"The question that we really tried to answer was, if we could separate websites that have misinformation from sites that have more accurate content," added Dr. Elmer Bernstam from the University of Texas. "No combination of the criteria allowed us to differentiate the websites with accurate information versus those that did not."

"Many consumers are satisfied with the information they find online and make treatment choices on the basis of this information," the researchers wrote. But they were troubled to find the sites addressing complementary and alternative therapies had the most inaccuracies, as doctors have less opportunity to correct mistaken beliefs about these.

"In some cases, patients do not discuss their use of online complementary and alternative medicine treatments with their clinicians," they wrote.