Has anybody researched the area of legitimacy of medical information in online healthcare support communities?

At U of Kentucky, we just held our biennial Kentucky Conference on Health Communication and this year's theme was "Trends and Issues in Cancer Communication". The top student paper addressed some of your questions. The paper was "Knowledge is Power: Information Seeking of Internet Cancer Support Group Members" authored by Tamar Ginossar from the University of New Mexico. The other person who may have some information for you is Dr. Gary Schwitzer at the University of Minnesota. He has expertise in online patient decision-making tools and when he and I talked he mentioned other types of online support communities. Additionally, our college dean here at UK, Dr. J. David Johnson, has done extensive work on cancer-related information seeking and how people find information and how valuable that information is. Also, perhaps some of the links at the National Cancer Institute's health comm site might be useful too -- http://dccps.nci.nih.gov/hcirb/resources.html If you would like more contact information, please feel free to reach me off-list. regards, Suzie ************************************************************ Suzie Allard, KY Opportunity Fellow University of Kentucky (859)257-3771 College of Communications and Information Studies 520 King Library South, Lexington, KY 40506-0039 e-mail: slalla0@uky.edu homepage: http://sweb.uky.edu/~slalla0/ ***********************************************************