Kassirer Jerome P. Patients, Physicians, and the Internet. Health Affairs November/December 2000.

http://www.pewinternet.org/Presentations/2010/Feb/Media–Medicine-in-Modern-America.aspx

I riffed a bit about some of the issues raised in the comments above, but didn’t get those into the written document. Thanks again for the suggestions!

One example/possible reading recommendation that I use in class for highlighting issues with medicine and media is: “Is Cybermedicine Killing You” – The Story of a Cochrane Disaster” (http://www.jmir.org/2005/2/e21/). It demonstrates the importance of evaluating medical information (vs. accepting everything you are told), and how research results can be sensationalized and distorted by irresponsible/uninformed members of the media. Most of the headlines that came out of it specifically discouraged people from looking online for health-related information. However, it has a happy ending where a sort of expert crowdsourcing detected the errors and helped remedy the situation…

I coincidentally just gave that lecture earlier this week, and wrote a quick summary piece in a post (http://bit.ly/a3QVBG). Hope this helps and I look forward to hearing about your experience there.

An obvious missing link is Gary Schwitzer’s Healthnews Review blog: http://www.healthnewsreview.org/blog/

I would also tak of the long running media representation of the Internet and the cyberchondriacs usually with negative overtones. And of the lack of serious conversations about how the millions of networked patients are slowly but certainly transforming the practice of medicine.

Finally I’ll notice, since this is the e-patients blog, that talking about the interaction of the 2 industries, by definition, gives the patients a secondary role. Once again, an example of the missing stakeholder syndrome.