NAME: STEWART WANI REGISTRATION NUMBER: R114504F DEGREE PROGRAM: MBChBI QUESTION: Identify 2 sources of health info and

briefly discuss tools that are needed to remove info from those sources, citing specific examples (50 marks) LECTURER: Mr. Malapela DUE DATE: October 19, 2011

Dictionary.com gives its second definition of information as, Knowledge gained through study, communication, instruction, etc. Information is the data that one gathers in order to help one accurately assess a situation in order to ensure the best chance of a beneficial decision being made. It helps one to paint a picture of a given set of circumstances so that one can determine the course of action to take. It is used by sports coaches in order to call plays. It is used by businessmen in order to decide which deals to make. It is used by juries in order to make decisions about a defendants innocence. More relevantly, it is used by doctors in order to make good life-or-death decisions, and it is used by researchers in order to properly address a problem or an unanswered question. Health information is a more specific type of information which pertains to the medical field, and includes many forms of multimedia and literature pertaining to human health and the conditions which compromise it. Health information of all forms aims at giving its consumers a better understanding of how to preserve all of the processes that occur in the human body. In our present age, due to the development and increasing popularity of the Internet, medical researchers face an unprecedented challenge: as opposed to the lack of information which used to plague the philosophers of old, present medical researchers now face an abundance of information, to the extent that they have to gain the insight to distinguish between what is unreliable, what is irrelevant and what is useful. A vast array of websites, articles and journals, all of which claim to be able to help a medical researcher, are readily available online. Certain tools on the internet help a researcher to

narrow his search through sources on the internet to relevant areas. These tools include search engines, health databases, portals, medical archives and repositories.

There are numerous websites on the internet which serve to provide health information. While many of these websites are useful, some are not so reliable. It is important to be able to differentiate between what is reliable and what is not. An educationally acceptable, reliable website would be a website operated by an organization, government or educational institution, because these sites are more liable to check and make sure their information is accurate, and their access is limited. One good example of such a website is Hinari, a health database operated by the World Health Organization (WHO). Other such websites include links to lectures and papers published by established universities such as Stanford and Harvad. Other websites include Wikipedia, which must be handled with caution, due to the high accessibility to the public, which allows even the most obscure of laymen to edit information on the website. Although there are experts constantly watching the websites content, it is very easy for inaccurate information to be posted and collected from such sites. It is advisable to consider the references which a website such as Wikipedia would cite. One must be cautious when dealing with websites like these, and to always crossreference the data obtained from them against a more reliable source.

Journals are abundant and easily accessible. Even extremely old journals have been virtualized and can be found on the internet. Journals present findings and experiments conducted by previous researchers, and make it easier for future researchers to expand on

their works. However, caution must be taken to consider the date on which the journal was published. Since medicine is a dynamic field of study with new ground-breaking developments occurring frequently, it may not take long before a publication is rendered out of date. A researcher must take care to make sure all of his information is current when dealing with journals.

When going through websites and journals and articles which have been placed on the internet, certain tools can be used to make the search easier. Search engines are tools on the internet which sift through information online in order to find any words matching the words that a searcher is looking for. They present the websites which contain matches to the searcher to work through. A prominent example of a search engine is Google, which searches every page on the internet in order to find any word that has been typed in its search field. This tool is useful because it pulls relevant websites towards the searcher and saves the searcher the time and effort that it would take to look for the websites manually. However, search engines such as Google have their downfalls. As a search engine which generates results based on the words that it can find in websites, it has a propensity to generate some results which are irrelevant to the topic that the researcher would be looking up. Care must also be taken with Google, because it is, above all, a commercial enterprise. The results are generated not in order of academic relevance, but in terms of which companies have paid for the top places on search lists. Subsidiaries such as Google Scholar and Google Books work slightly differently. Google Books searches through

only books, while Google Scholar searches through journals and articles, and lists them based on the number of citations for each paper. Again, this should be regarded with caution, because the older (and possibly out of date) articles are more likely to have more citations because they have been around for longer. Care must be taken when using search engines to ensure that information gathered is both relevant and up-to-date.

Health Databases have proven to be very useful when extracting health information from the internet. These are websites which provide access to journals and articles specifically related to the medical field. One such example is PubMed, which provides access to medical journals and articles, clinical queries and trials and news on new developments. A simple search engine at the top of the page helps to navigate a searcher to specific papers related to his topic of study. PubMed provides a certain level of access to the public, and grants even greater access to anybody with an affiliation to a medical or educational institute (such as a lecturer or a doctor). All of the literature found in health databases is well-established and reputable. The only downfall to a researcher would be its limited access to certain articles if the researcher lacks the necessary credentials.

Web portals are multi-purpose websites which bring together information from diverse sources, and provide links to these sources, as well as other services such e-mail, news, stock prices, information, databases and entertainment. A prominent example of a portal is Yahoo! which offers vast amounts of information about numerous fields, although there is a lack of health information.

Archives and repositories are useful because they contain old studies and medical cases which serve to provide adequate secondary information for any researcher. These can be accessed from hospital or government websites.

In conclusion, there are numerous sources of information, and numerous ways to extract the information that a researcher would need. It is imperative for researchers to become proficient in handling information from information sources on the internet, knowing where to find it and judging its worth.

REFERENCES: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/information (viewed on 17 October 2011) http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/information-semantic/ (viewed on 18 October 2011)