“A study analyzing the accuracy of online symptom-checking websites and apps reveals that the quality of their diagnostic advice varies considerably, and on average they only list the correct diagnosis first about one-third (36 percent) of the time.
“While it may be tempting to use these tools to find out what may be causing your symptoms, most of the time they are unreliable at best and can be dangerous at worst,”
“Generally the triage advice erred on the side of caution, which in some ways is good, but can lead to people going to an emergency department when they really don’t need to.”
“Diagnosis is not a single assessment, but rather a process requiring knowledge, experience, clinical examination and testing, and the passage of time, impossible to replicate in a single online interaction.”
“They don’t know your medical history or other symptoms. For people who lack health knowledge, they may think the advice they’re given is accurate or that their condition is not serious when it may be.”
Posted onApril 19, 2020|Comments Off on A toolkit for spotting fake news – Simon Black – Medium
Fake News can kill. Ignore this information at your peril.
In this post I am including all the useful resources I can find on combating fake news on the internet including plugins and browser extensions and recent developments. The last toolkit source below even though it was in 2019 seemed to describe all the best tools. Above the source below is a list of links and info of recent developments on fake news:
“Since people consume online news via a browser, browser extensions (and app-based services) have become more popular. These include:
“– Our.News. This service uses a combination of objective facts (about an article) with subjective views that incorporate user ratings to create labels (like nutrition labels on food) next to new articles that a reader can use to make a judgement. Our.News labels use publisher descriptions from Freedom Forum, bias ratings from AllSides, information about an article’s sources author and editor. It also uses fact-checking information from sources including PolitiFact, Snopes and FactCheck.org, and labels such as “clickbait” or “satire” along with and user ratings and reviews. The Our.News browser extension is available for Firefox and Chrome, and there is an iOS app. For more information go to https://our.news/.
“– NewsGuard. This service, for personal use or for NewsGuard’s library and school system partners, offers a reliability rating score of 0-100 for each site based on its performance on nine key criteria, ratings icons (green-red ratings) next to links on all of the top search engines, social media platforms, and news aggregation websites. Also, NewsGuard gives summaries showing who owns each site, its political leaning (if any), as well as warnings about hoaxes, political propaganda, conspiracy theories, advertising influences and more. For more information, go to https://www.newsguardtech.com/.
“The idea of fake news is not new. People have been manipulating facts, creating false narratives, and outright lying for as long as they have been communicating.That being said one thing to come out of the American presidential election in 2016 was the idea of fake news being pressed firmly into the mainstream consciousness.
“While it has been used as a tool by precisely those who seek to lie to the public it is nevertheless a timely reminder that new communication technologies have created a surge in fake news for two reasons; They allow new ways for manipulated stories to be produced, distributed, and consumed.
“At the same time the shift away from a subscription model of journalism to one driven by page views and streams has taken us back to the days of the “yellow press”. Digital news producers are standing on the figurative street corners of Google, Facebook, and other such sites and trying to grab as much traffic as possible from the stream of people flowing by.
“While this technological disruption has changed things and allowed fake news to spread it has also provided powerful tools for spotting, and sorting news. I’ve started this page as a place to gather the different types of sites that are available online. These are divided into the following categories;Fact checking sites, Lobbyist and donation tracking sites, Plugins, browser extensions, and apps.
(Continue reading full details at source above.)
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Posted onMarch 14, 2020|Comments Off on The Growth of Telemedicine in the Coronavirus Pandemic
In the wake of the Coronavirus Pandemic, new resources and coverage for telemedicine and telehealth have been created. See >new telehealth coverage 2020
>A Guide to TelemedicineNew healthcare options called telemedicine and telehealth are rapidly becoming available for patients in the U.S. What is telemedicine? It’s a remote live and interactive communication, usually a type of online video chat, with a healthcare provider. For certain types of illnesses patients can be seen remotely using modern technology. Healthcare providers can often complete an exam, make a diagnosis, and even write a prescription for you, all from the comfort of your home. Today, telemedicine is often used to treat patients with chronic diseases like high blood pressure, urgent care visits for coughs and colds, and to connect primary care physicians with medical specialists.
>Is Telemedicine the Future of Care? Also referred to as telemedicine or telehealth, virtual care involves the remote diagnosis and treatment of patients by medical experts who are miles or even continents away. Heralded as a way to save money while providing quality care for patients who might not otherwise have access to specialists, telemedicine has exploded in growth during the past decade…
>Medical Diagnosis by Webcam? Proponents say telemedicine has the potential to improve access to care, lower costs and provide reliable, specialized care to patients who need it. But some doctors and researchers question to what degree virtual care equates to in-person treatment, and whether these e-physicians might overprescribe drugs to keep patients satisfied, misdiagnose an ailment or miss a more serious medical problem entirely. In Texas, the state medical board passed regulations last year restricting such long-distance consults, a move that has sparked litigation…While the virtual visits provide an option for minor medical problems, patients should avoid suggesting a self-diagnosis, as it may influence the doctor, UCSF’s Dudley says. A patient who blames shortness of breath on asthma, for example, may steer the doctor away from considering other possibilities, such as a heart condition. As with any appointment, patients need to make sure the doctor is attuned to their needs and symptoms.
>Telehealth and Medicare: What Is Covered While Medicare’s coverage of telehealth historically has been limited,recent policy changes have begun to broaden its use. This fact sheet describes the telehealth-provided services available to Medicare beneficiaries. These include current as well as new services resulting from recent policy changes.
>Telehealth: Technology meets health careTelehealth is the use of digital information and communication technologies, such as computers and mobile devices, to access health care services remotely and manage your health care. These may be technologies you use from home or that your doctor uses to improve or support health care services.
>Telemedicine: The Doctor Is Online, but at What Cost? The AMA now endorses telemedicine as long as there is a valid patient/physician relationship, through at minimum a face-to-face examination (The new policy allows that the “face-to-face examination” could occur virtually…For patients well known to their physicians, follow-up telemedicine visits might be advantageous. For example, an orthopedic surgeon who has recently repaired a broken hip in a nursing home patient could inspect healing with the help of a competent on-site assistant and video camera, saving a difficult, painful, and expensive patient transport to the office. It’s a win/win situation for everyone: less trouble for the patient, a quick visit from the doctor via video software, and more time for the orthopedic surgeon to do cases in the operating room or evaluate patients in the office who require hands-on care…The success of an e-visit also depends upon patients making the right complaint. How many times has your doctor said, “I understand that you have pain in your (fill in the blank), but what’s really bothering you?” In all likelihood, this type of nuance goes out the window in most telemedicine consults…Although virtual consultations may result in satisfactory outcomes for simple medical problems, such as colds and urinary tract infections—perhaps even with cost savings compared with an in-person visit—it is unclear how many important diagnoses will be missed owing to the lack of a real-life, face-to-face interaction.
>Using Telehealth to Improve Home-Based Care for Older Adults and Family Caregivers (>Full Report) This paper describes the consumer perspective on the value of telehealth and the current policy concerns with this avenue of health care delivery. This consumer perspective is provided by AARP’s Public Policy Institute on behalf of older adults and their family caregivers. As technology progresses and more care is delivered via telephone, video, e-mail, and other telehealth methods, more research will be needed to identify the models of care that provide the highest quality with the most access to consumers. Research has shown that there are types of telehealth that help some older adults with specific chronic needs, although they don’t help all. As more care is provided via telehealth services, there will be more evidence to further demonstrate telehealth’s usefulness and its cost-effectiveness—or lack thereof.
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The Patient Advisor 