We're in PubMed, Bitches!

Of course the journal is Journal of Medical Internet Research and the article is mostly about consumers bitching about side effects online, but, hey, there we are, going head-to-head with WebMD once again.

Can Online Consumers Contribute to Drug Knowledge? A Mixed-Methods Comparison of Consumer-Generated and Professionally Controlled Psychotropic Medication Information on the Internet

Crazy Meds and Ask a Patient vs. WebMD and former consumer-generated media site Revolution Health on the effects of Lexapro and Seroquel. The results:

Consumer reviews and professional medication descriptions generally reported similar effects of two psychotropic medications but differed in their descriptions and in frequency of reporting. Professional medication descriptions offer the advantage of a concise yet comprehensive listing of drug effects, while consumer reviews offer greater context and situational examples of how effects may manifest in various combinations and to varying degrees. The dispersion of consumer reviews across websites limits their integration, but a brief browsing strategy on the two target medications nonetheless retrieved representative consumer content. Current strategies for filtering online health searches to return only trusted or approved websites may inappropriately address the challenge to identify quality health sources on the Internet because such strategies unduly limit access to an entire complementary source for health information.

The data are clear: WebMD can suck it.

The paper raises two points I constantly reiterate:
1 - Consumer-oriented sites, including this forum, skew negative, which is why I don't depend solely on them for the anecdotal evidence I use in my drug pages.
2 - Like drug company-sponsored studies, drug company-sponsored professionally-run sites tend to  skew positive, which is one reason why I think they are still useful.

You have to really read the article to realize Crazy Meds and Ask a Patient are not total bitchfests about meds, especially since significantly more people taking each med reported they worked better on the consumer-oriented sites than on the professionally-run sites.  I may have to re-evaluate how the stats skew.