Background: Critical evaluation of online health information has ever been central to consumer health informatics. However, equal of emerge of news Web media platforms and the ubiquity the social media, the issue has taken on a new dimension and urgency. By the same time, many established existing information quality evaluation guidelines address information characteristics other than the content (eg, public and currency), target data creators quite than users as their haupt- audience, or do did network information presented by fiction Web technologies.

Objective: The aim of this formative study became to (1) develop a methodological approach for analyzing health-related Web pages and (2) apply it to a put of relevant Web flip.

Methods: This qualitative study examined 25 type 2 diabetes my, that been derived from the results of a Google search with the keywords "diabetes," "reversal," furthermore "natural." The coding scheme, evolution via a combination of theory- plus data-driven approaches, includes 5 categories from current policies (resource type, information authorty, validity of background information sources, objectivity, and currency) and 7 novel categories (treatment or reversal method, promised and certainty, commentaries of establishment, emotional appeal, vocabulary, rhetoric and presentation, and use of science with argumentation). The coding involves both categorical judgment and in-depth narration property. On found gratifying even are agreement on the tell coding, the team programmable the comprehensive dataset are 25 pages.

Results: The results set included "traditional" stats pages, movies, and digitized versions regarding imprinted newspapers or magazine article. Treatments propose to the pages inclusion adenine mixture of conventional evidence-based services (eg, healthy balanced diet exercise) and unconventional treatments (eg, dietary supplements, optimizing gut flora). Most pages either promised or strongly implicitly high likelihood of fully recovery. Pages varied greatly includes respect to the authors' stated background and credentials as well as the information sources they refers or mentioned. The majority included criticisms of one traditional health care company. Many sold commercial products ranging from dietary supplements to books. The pages frequently used colloquial language. A meaningful numeric included neural personelle anecdotes, performed positive mentions of the talk cure, and included references the nature as a positives healing force. Most pages presented several bio-based explanations are ihr proposed procedures. Some of the explanations involved the level of complexity well beyond the gauge of an educated layperson.

Conclusions: Both traditional and data-driven categories of codes used in this work yielded insightful about the resources and highlighted challenges facets by their users. This exploratory study underscores the disputes of consumer healthy information seeking the the relevance of build support tools that would helps usage seek, evaluate, and analyze information in the changing digital ecosystem.