What site should you go to online to research breast reconstruction? A recent plastic surgery study will help you find out.

Posted on October 13, 2014

Interesting study out of the recent September 2014 Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery Journal, “Online Patient Resources for Breast Reconstruction: An Analysis of Readability.”
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Wow. Hard title, but that is the point. It is talking about doctor speak.  What it is saying is when you- a normal breathing non-surgeon type who did not spend years studying medicine and medical terminology- read an online resource talking about all of this stuff, do you understand it? Are the websites doing a good job of converting “doctor speak” into English?

I thought this was an interesting article, as I try to find ways of describing medical things using other analogies a lot. (Ask anyone about my description of how your skin is like a bathing suit or how fat transfer is like plating a garden and you’ll know why.)  Medical stuff is hard to understand, even for those of us who live and breathe it daily.  Turns out the NIH and AMA advise health literature for patients to be written at a sixth grade reading level.  When this study went online and looked at the top 10 websites used by patients, they found the average grade level required a 12th grade reading level.  What this means is many patients are reading these sites, but they are not able to understand what it is saying.  And there was significant variation between sites.

So, I won’t bore you by all of the details (They evaluated the sites with 10 different tests for readability.  My favorite of these was the Simple Measure of Gobbledygook a.k.a. SMOG analysis) but the top 10 sites were:

And the best 3 as far as readability goes were Nlm.nih.org, Cancer.org, and Breastcancer.org.

They did not look at content, nor click on the links to other sites and chat rooms.

With the Internet blossoming as a source of information which you can access 24/7 with anonymity from your home, it is important you get good information which you can understand.  I daily see patients who have become educated on a subject on the internet.  Sometimes they have a great understanding of the issues, but sometimes they are led astray by poor information.  The goal with education is you, the patient, can truly understand what is going on, the potential risks and complications, what choices you have, and the likely outcome.  Fundamentally you need to understand it to make good decisions.