Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
is possible for many persons to communicate to many, at a chosen point
of time and on a global scale. The number of people who report that they
use the Internet is continuously increasing. In Great Britain, 64 per cent of
households in social class one and 48 per cent in social class two reported
the ownership of home computers and use of Internet at home at the end of
the last century (Hardey 1999). In the year 2000, more than 80 per cent of
households in the US reported they used the Internet every week (Castells
2001) and in 2005, 83 per cent of the Swedish population aged 16-75 years
reported that they used the Internet. Due to lack of resources as well as
poverty and illiteracy it will however be a long time before most people in
the world have access to this new medium of communication.
In the health policy discourse in many Western countries, great hopes are
set on electronic media such as interactive TV and the Internet. They are
regarded as promising means that may solve the problem of patients lacking
enough information to be able to make informed decisions about their
health.
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Some researchers stress this view. For example Eysenbach supports
a positive view of the role of information technologies, such as the Internet,
in the fi eld of health:
Information technology and consumerism are synergistic forces that
promote an 'information age healthcare system' in which consumers
can, ideally, use information technology to gain access to information
and control their own health care, thereby utilising healthcare resources
more effi ciently.
(Eysenbach 2000: 1714)
Thus, these three conditions - the change in the view of expert knowledge,
seeing people as responsible for their own health and the emergence of new
information technologies - will without doubt have consequences for the
role of lay as well as medical knowledge and the nature of the information
environment. For example, the circulation of medical knowledge, which
used to be inaccessible, on the Internet has increased enormously in the last
few years. But the Internet is not just a place for offi cial and professionally
produced or controlled information. The Internet offers a mixture of health
related material, produced for very different reasons and by different agents
such as big drug companies, small health fi rms, lay people, patients, support
or activist groups, medical professional authorities, professional pressure
groups or governmental authorities. Hardey points out that 'Within it the
boundaries around medical science, the health professions and non-orthodox
approaches to health are blurred' (2002: 44).
As the Internet offers interactive communication opportunities, information
is increasingly circulated in a range of ways, from chat rooms and newsgroups
to homepages, mail lists and Internet kiosks. How, then, is it possible for lay
persons to navigate in this plethora of health related information? According to
Hardey, individuals searching health information on the Internet 'dynamically
