Selected news stories about the Pew Internet Project and articles citing our data.
Hunting For Health
Patients are searching for more medical info online
5/30/2005 | 
Coverage
Josh Fischman, U.S. News & World Report, Health & Medicine
'"Finding a new doctor in a new town is a daunting task. The Pew Internet and American Life Project wanted to find out if the online world made it any easier. So they did a survey. "One person said she had polio as a child, was moving to San Antonio, and needed a specialist in post-polio syndrome," says Susannah Fox, the project's associate director. "By going online, she was able to find two even before she moved."
Doc shopping is just one of several online health activities that are on the increase, according to the Pew survey, released last week: 28 percent of American Internet users do it, compared with 21 percent just two years ago. Searches for diet or nutritional supplement information are also on the rise, as are forays onto the Web for info about health insurance, drugs, and experimental treatments. Overall, 80 percent of people who use the Internet say they use it to find information on health topics. That's a lot higher than what appeared in some other surveys of Internet health use, which had put the number at about 50 percent. "That's the same answer we got when we only asked a general question about health," Fox says. "So we decided to get more specific and ask about 16 different health topics. When you ask specific questions, it jogs people's memories: 'Oh yeah, I did search for health insurance.' And when we rolled all this together, we got the higher number."
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