Medical Information on the Internet Hit and Miss

I have been awol here for the last 6-8 weeks and there’s a pretty good reason for it.  Okay actually there are 3 good reasons.

1. Kid’s soccer takes an amazing amount of time for parent’s who choose to help the coach during practice.
2. My wife’s grandfather went into the hospital because of a brain tumor 6 weeks ago.  This was a very slow growing tumor that they knew about but it suddenly started growing quickly and created pressure on his brain.  He survived surgery (he was only given a 15% chance of making it) but until just recently has required a lot of help from family members even while he was in the hospital.
3. My wife’s mother was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer within a week of her father going into the hospital (he with the brain tumor).  She was operated on immediately and has recovered fairly well from that but now comes chemo therapy.

Needless to say the above took a lot of time away from my normal day to day life.  I am just now coming out from under a siege of emails, etc… and finding time to relax just a bit.   Granted, our family won’t be too relaxed for some time as grandpa and mom are going to be longer term concerns.

 Speaking of health concerns.  Given the tough news we’ve had in the last couple of months I have spent some time trying to research what we’re up against and/or just what the heck those doctors were saying.  In general I found that medical information on the internet fell into one of two general categories.

1. Useless superficial information - This is the most prevelant brand I found.  What made it particularly irritating was finding multiple high ranked sites with essentially the same information, sometimes verbatim.  Apparently Google has put it’s “trust” in a few of the wrong sites as there is a plethora of very basic copied information residing on medical pages/sites.
2. Useless technical information - Not nearly as prevelant as #1 but no less useless to me.  I’m researching colon cancer because I didn’t fully understand what the doctor said when he tried to dumb down the explanation to an average joe (me).  That probably means I’m not prepared to read research papers on colon cancer written by doctors for doctors.

Yes, I’ve seen the commercials for WebMD and looked at a ton of other supposedly great health sites as well.  But in my experience they came up lacking, seriously.