Abstract
Objective: The internet has become one of the primary resources for patients to obtain health-related information. While the internet continues to evolve in terms of coverage and technology, concerns regarding the quality of available information have arisen. We aimed to investigate the quality of health-related information on Turkish-language medical websites by comparing it to that of English-language medical websites, in which the subject has long been studied.
Methods: The English term “total knee prosthesis” and its Turkish translation, “total diz protezi,” were searched in Google. The 1st 30 results were assessed using a validated tool, the LIDA (Minervation, Oxford, UK), which was designed for the scoring of health-related websites according to accessibility, usability, and reliability.
Results: The Turkish- and English-language websites were not significantly different in terms of accessibility, but the usability and reliability of Turkish websites were found to be significantly poorer. We found that the overall quality of information on Turkish websites was poor in comparison with that of English-language websites.
Conclusion: In order to raise consciousness about this problem and improve the quality of health-related information, further studies on Turkish-language websites should be performed. Attempts should also be made in Turkish-language websites to develop website certification systems and/or encourage the dissemination of existing systems.
DOI: 10.3944/AOTT.2015.14.0291
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