(Press-News.org) MAYWOOD, Il. - Millions of Americans read physician ratings on websites such as Healthgrades.com, but such ratings are based on scores from an average of only 2.4 patients, a Loyola University Medical Center study has found.
The study of 500 randomly selected urologists found that 79.6 percent of physicians were rated by at least one of the 10 free physician-review websites researchers examined. Eighty-six percent of physicians had positive ratings, with 36 percent receiving highly positive ratings. Healthgrades had the most physician ratings.
Results were published online ahead of print in the Journal of Urology.
"Consumers should be cautious when they look at these ratings," said first author Chandy Ellimoottil, MD. "Our findings suggest that consumers should take these ratings with a grain of salt."
Ellimoottil explained that because physicians typically receive so few ratings, a highly negative or highly positive score from just one or two patients could skew the physician's rating. "These sites have potential to help inform consumers," Ellimoottil said. "But the sites need more reviews to make them more reliable."
Half of Americans who go online for health information look up their providers and 40 percent use physician-review websites. But there have been few studies about such websites.
Ellimoottil, senior author Ahmer Farooq, DO and colleagues randomly selected 500 of the nation's 9,940 urologists for inclusion in the study, including 471 male and 29 female urologists from 39 states. On each website, the number of reviews per physician ranged from zero to 64, with the average 2.4.
Researchers found no statistically significant difference in the median number of reviews when gender, region and city size were compared.
Healthgrades posted reviews on 54 percent of physicians, followed in order by Vitals.com, 45 percent of physicians; Avvo.com, 39 percent; RateMDs.com, 25 percent; Drscore, 13 percent; Revolutionhealth.com, 5 percent; Kudzu.com and Healthcarereviews.com, 1 percent; and Zocdoc.com and Yelp.com, less than 1 percent.
Researchers also conducted a qualitative analysis of written comments posted on a single website, Vitals.com. Comments were rated extremely negative (such as "He needs to retire as he can barely walk"); negative; neutral; positive; or extremely positive (such as "One of the best checkups in a long time!!"). Three percent of these written comments were extremely negative, 22 percent were negative, 22 percent were neutral, 39 percent were positive and 14 percent were extremely positive.
INFORMATION:
Farooq is an instructor and Ellimoottil is a resident in the Department of Urology of Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine. Other co-authors, all in Loyola's Department of Urology, are Marcus L. Quek, MD, associate professor; Kristin Greco, MD, resident; and Alissa Hart, medical student.
END
Today, mothers of newborns find themselves confronting a common dilemma: Should they let their babies "cry it out" when they wake up at night? Or should they rush to comfort their crying little one?
In fact, waking up in the middle of the night is the most common concern that parents of infants report to pediatricians. Now, a new study from Temple psychology professor Marsha Weinraub gives parents some scientific facts to help with that decision.
The study, published in Developmental Psychology, supports the idea that a majority of infants are best left to self-soothe ...
Athens, Ga. – Why do girls get better grades in elementary school than boys—even when they perform worse on standardized tests?
New research from the University of Georgia and Columbia University published in the current issue of Journal of Human Resources suggests that it's because of their classroom behavior, which may lead teachers to assign girls higher grades than their male counterparts.
"The skill that matters the most in regards to how teachers graded their students is what we refer to as 'approaches toward learning,'" said Christopher Cornwell, head of economics ...
CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Almost all computer chips use two types of transistors: one called p-type, for positive, and one called n-type, for negative. Improving the performance of the chip as a whole requires parallel improvements in both types.
At the IEEE's International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) in December, researchers from MIT's Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) presented a p-type transistor with the highest "carrier mobility" yet measured. By that standard, the device is twice as fast as previous experimental p-type transistors and almost four times as fast ...
Tropical Storm Freda may no longer be a tropical storm, but as a low pressure area it is bringing rainfall and gusty winds to New Caledonia. Two NASA satellites captured two different looks at the storm.
Wind shear has punched Freda down to tropical storm status on Jan. 1 and weakened it to a remnant low pressure area on Jan. 2. NASA's Aqua satellite showed strong thunderstorms were over New Caledonia early on Jan. 2, while NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite peered under the hood of Freda's clouds and measured some moderate to heavy rainfall the ...
BETHESDA, Md. (Jan. 2, 2012)—A new study led by North Carolina researchers has found that when it comes to weight- and fat loss, aerobic training is better than resistance training. The study is believed to the largest randomized trial to directly compare changes in body composition induced by comparable amounts of time spent doing aerobic and resistant training, or both in combination, among previously inactive overweight or obese non-diabetic adults.
The study is entitled "Effects of aerobic and/or resistance training on body mass and fat mass in overweight or obese ...
There's a saying that goes, "as long as there are tests, there will be prayer in public schools." At one time, that likely reflected a fairly uniform view about school prayer: that despite what federal law said about the practice, religious Americans by and large approved of it.
A new study, however, paints a more complicated picture of attitudes toward school prayer over the last four decades, finding sharp differences in school-prayer support between different generations and their religious denominations.
Forthcoming in the journal Sociological Forum, the study ...
Demyelinating diseases, such as multiple sclerosis (MS), are frequently associated with the progressive loss of vision. The retinal nerve damage is thought to be caused by immune system-mediated inflammation; however, other demyelinating disorders, such as Pelizaeus-Merzbacher disease, do not involve the immune system, suggesting that there are other causes of retinal nerve damage. Deimination is a protein modification that is altered in patients with MS and PMD. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers led by Sanjoy Bhattacharya at the University ...
Bacterial imbalance contributes to intestinal inflammation and carcinogenesis
Instability in the composition of gut bacterial communities (dysbiosis) has been linked to common human intestinal disorders, including inflammatory bowel disease and colorectal cancer; however, it is unclear if dysbiosis can instigate disease or if it is a consequence of the underlying disorder. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers led by Mathias Chamaillard at the University Lille Nord de France in Lille, France, examined intestinal inflammation and tumorigenesis ...
Instability in the composition of gut bacterial communities (dysbiosis) has been linked to common human intestinal disorders, including inflammatory bowel disease and colorectal cancer; however, it is unclear if dysbiosis can instigate disease or if it is a consequence of the underlying disorder. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers led by Mathias Chamaillard at the University Lille Nord de France in Lille, France, examined intestinal inflammation and tumorigenesis in a mouse model of dysbiosis. Dysbiosis enhanced intestinal inflammation and ...
PITTSBURGH, Jan. 2, 2013 – The presence of a certain molecule allows the immune system to effectively police tuberculosis (TB) of the lungs and prevent it from turning into an active and deadly infection, according to a new study led by researchers at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Their findings appear today in the online version of the Journal of Clinical Investigation.
More than 2 billion people or one-third of the world's population are infected with mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes ...
