Part 1 of 2 parts
When I came across this blog in my
subscription to kevinmd.com, I thought great, something I can relate
to and something that will expand and be good for another blog on the
topic of diabetes education. However, after reading carefully, I
will need to make at least one caveat to his analysis. His blog is
about diseases and as such, he is correct across the broad spectrum
of diseases in general, but this should not be about the diseases
only. After correspondence with Edward Leigh, I would add that I am
not only interested in the disease, in my case diabetes, but the
nutrition in treating the disease, which should be an integral part
of any treatment therapy or options for any disease.
The author, Edward Leigh, MA, is right
to suggest paying attention to the website's “ending designation or
domain name.” However, your homework is not done just because a
website is of certain types. There can still be bad sites within
these domain names and often you need to be careful. With that, I
will list five of the most common ending domain names without
comment. The list includes .gov, .edu, .org,
.com, and .net. Yes, there are others, but very seldom
will you find medical or nutritional information on them.
In general, each has its strengths and
weaknesses; the order is ranking them from most reliable to least
reliable. You may get tripped up by the weaknesses if you do not pay
attention to what you are reading. An example: The USDA Dietary
Guidelines.
Several government agencies are
involved in the above image; however, the author of the Dietary
Guidelines is not mentioned. This is the U.S. Department of
Agriculture (USDA). Therefore, when reading under the USDA website,
please be aware that not everything is done in the best interest of its citizens. USDA's sole purpose is to promote US
agriculture and some of the foods are not always the most beneficial
for us. It took the CDC and the National Center for Health
Statistics to combine and show us the error of believing everything
published by the USDA. I must thank the Healthy Nation Coalition
website for pointing this out.
Even other government agencies make
mistakes as well and they print retractions and issue corrections,
but not the USDA. So in general this can be a fatal flaw in
believing that websites ending in .gov are to be relied upon. More
than any other domain name, these websites are normally the most
reliable.
The .edu websites must be an
educational institution to receive and use this domain name.
Generally, patients can obtain excellent information from these
websites, but again care must be taken and sometimes you will need to
explore complicated sites to find good information, as they will
openly and even not so openly be promoting medical services that many
patients may not be looking for or needing. This may be because they
have aligned themselves with a hospital system or have a medical
education department wanting to expand.
Associations and non-profit
organizations normally use this domain name - .org. While the
majority of groups using this designation are reputable, any
individual can get this domain name by filing as a non-profit, and
this can create problems when they are unscrupulous people.
The next two, .com, and .net are
website designations to be very cautious about. Yes, my site has
this designation - .com. .com is generally for commercial use, but
many medical websites use this domain name. There are many reputable
websites with these endings, but I urge caution as there are many
snake oil sales people using these domain names. Then there are also
many outright fraudulent sites as well. This requires you to be
extra vigilant and read with caution or a jaundiced eye.
Some medical information can be found
on .net domains, but generally this is used when the name in .com in
unavailable and for some other purposes like networks and internet
service provider usage.
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