Health is without doubt one of the most popular topics searched for when people go online.  Indeed, a UK study suggested that nearly half of all searchers in 2013 were health related.

Nowhere is this more so than among the young, with a recent study finding that 84 percent of teenagers turn to Dr Google for health information.

The study, by researchers at Northwestern University, shows an age group only too happy to look online for information around drugs, puberty, sex and depression, with around 1 in 3 saying that the information they found led to behavioral changes.

“We found some real surprises about what teens are doing online when it comes to their health,” the authors say.  “We often hear about all the negative things kids are doing online, but teens are using the Internet to take care of themselves and others around them.”

Ensuring information is accurate

With the web clearly empowering young people to take an active interest in their health, the key then becomes to ensure the information displayed is as accurate and helpful as possible.

As searching for health online has become more popular, there have been a number of projects aiming to highlight reputable sources.  The Information Standard for instance is a NHS run project aiming to ‘kitemark’ reputable sources of content, but it doesn’t extend very far online yet, with just 250 websites covered.

One site that does is Geneva based Health on the Net who aim to provide a reputation score for sites with quality information.  They’re slightly more wide reaching than The Information Standard, with 5,000 sites included.

Alas, more needs to be done, and it is no doubt this challenge that prompted a group of Belgian doctors to launch a campaign last year to try and stop people Googling their symptoms.

The conduit of mum and dad

The Northwestern study cautions however, that whilst teens are getting a lot of information from the web, their parents remain the primary source of health information, followed by their school and their doctor.

Educating parents therefore may be a hugely effective way of ensuring teenagers get the right information, especially as very few teens were shown to go online for information they felt they couldn’t get from their parents.

Of course, most of the time, it emerged that teens were searching for fitness and diet related issues.  Whilst that kind of information is undoubtedly important, it is perhaps not in the life threatening category that previous campaigns on health information focused upon.

Nevertheless, with teens revealing how behavior is changed by the information they find, it’s important that policy makers and the healthcare industry are aware of these changing means of accessing information.