The Internet is allowing cancer patients to become increasingly more educated about the disease they're facing and their treatment options, but UBC professor Richard Wassersug wants to ensure people are getting the right information online.
"The problem right now isn't that there isn't information, the problem is that there's so much information that it's hard to know what's reliable and what's not," Wassersug said.
By using the right online search techniques and by knowing what red flags to look for, Wassersug said patients and their families can not only become better informed about what's going on, they can even enhance their own treatment.
"Now it's possible for the average cancer patient or family memzber of a cancer patient who has the time to spend 20 hours a week finding the newest information when paradoxically, the doctor who is treating the patient doesn't have 20 hours free," he said. "So it's actually possible for the patient to become more informed."
On Wednesday night, Wassersug gave his presentation to the Prince George Prostate Cancer Support Group and he's giving a free public lecture today on the topic at The Exploration Place, beginning at 7 p.m.
During tonight's event, presented by the Prostate Cancer Foundation B.C., Wassersug will provide roughly a dozen tips for how the average citizen can find reliable information online.
Among the pratfalls Wassersug will caution about are sites that look like they're providing medical information, but are actually thinly-veiled advertisements for certain products or treatments.
"At the end they have disclaimers saying this is only for information purposes, we're not giving any medical advice," Wassersug said. "These are legalistic disclaimers essentially refuting everything that they said at the front end and they're hoping you never read the tiny print at the back end."
Not all of the unreliable information comes from people seeking to make a buck off cancer patients and their loved ones.
"There are also people who are sincere but aren't necessarily as scientific," Wassersug said.
Among the many tips Wassersug will discuss is how to access and use PubMed, a search engine for peer-reviewed papers on a variety of medical conditions. Although many of the papers are full of medical jargon, Wassersug said lay people shouldn't be afraid of the terminology.
"I would encourage the public not to be scared by the technical terms," he said. "Assuming they can get on the computer and know how to use Google, they can take those terms put them in Wikipedia and usually come up with definitions the average person can understand."
Wassersug said the knowledge divide between the medical experts and the general public is narrowing, and that's for the better. But he said it also presents a new dynamic for physicians who are dealing with patients who come in with stacks of their own research.
Wassersug is not a medical doctor, but as a research scientist he helps patients better deal with their treatments.
"I had the wife of one patient come to me and say, 'I have looked at this and I think I found what I want for my husband,' " Wassersug recalled. "The first thing she had looked like it was a scientific site but it was an ad for a company that makes surgical implements. It was not objective information."
Other times the patient may be providing valuable information that is new to the clinician, so Wassersug said if doctors have time to review in detail information patients provide, they should do so.
"The medical system needs to accept the fact that there's a huge amount of information that's now publicly accessible that the educated person can get do," he said.
