In a study presented recently at the International Meeting for Autism Research, experts analyzed about 160 of the most visited autism sites to determine how often they met measures of quality and accountability, including whether or not the site was selling something; if citations about research supposedly showing the efficacy of a treatment included author identification and references; if the information was current; and if the site asked visitors for personal information (a red flag).
Most sites did not meet all of the criteria for quality, said lead study author Brian Reichow, a post-doctoral associate at Yale University Child Study Center. And about 17 percent of the sites offered or sold treatments that had little or no scientific support.
"The Internet can provide parents with a lot of useful and helpful information, but there is a lot of misinformation online as well," Reichow said. "When using it to gain online health information, parents need to be cautious."
The desire to help their children and the lack of mainstream medical treatments for autism drives parents to seek alternatives, according to Dr. Paul Law, director of Kennedy Krieger Institute's Interactive Autism Network.
"You don't see lots of ideas for how to treat ear infections, because the treatment for that is well established," Law said. In contrast, "there are very few autism-based treatments that the field agrees on, so we don't have complete answers for those who are suffering from autism," he said. "That naturally triggers families to seek answers."
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Autism Online
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