A small survey from 2004 suggests that more than 80 percent of women seek health information online.

Meanwhile, a Google search for “women’s health” returns almost 6 million results, the Department of Health and Human Services’s 4parents.gov (intended to help parents talk to teens about sex) has been criticized for inaccuracy both before and after revisions, and an alternative to Wikipedia is being created to combat a perceived lack of credibility and expertise from the online giant.

So how can you make sense of the millions of websites and find online health information that is reliable?

MedlinePlus, from the National Library of Medicine, is often a good starting point, and offers this list of quality criteria health websites should meet to be considered reliable, and this guide to healthy web surfing. The Medical Library Association and the National Cancer Institute offer similar guides.

However, you can’t always trust government websites and sources to tell the whole story, as evidenced by the 4parents.gov controversy (see this July post for background) and reports of agenda-based pressure on the former Surgeon General, Dr. Richard Carmona.

Likewise, non-profit organizations often receive funding from sources that may influence their web content (such as pharmaceutical companies), and individuals may not have a firm grasp on or honest interpretation of the material they present that is drawn from other sources. A site’s purpose may simply be to sell something (such as supplements or weight loss products), limiting the balance of the information presented.

Some basic questions to ask when evaluating the reliability of health information websites:

- Who is the author? What are the author’s credentials? Does the author have an agenda to promote?

- Who pays for the site? Is the site selling something that affects the information it provides?

- Is the information up to date? Information can change quickly, such as new safety data on prescription and over-the-counter drugs. Can you tell when the site was last updated?

- Can you verify the presented facts or opinions? Are there any references that point you to the source of the information? Can you tell what is presented as a fact vs. an opinion?

Sites displaying the HON Code accreditation have met a basic threshold of quality and trustworthiness. Additionally, remember that even when sites present references in support of an agenda, those references may not support their claims when scrutinized.

These basic guidelines should give you a good start, as long as you keep a healthy dose of skepticism while looking for health information online.

Of course, you could always just start with the OBOS Health Resource Center – OBOS provides its own guide to navigating healthcare information, and is part of a coalition that rejects pharmaceutical-dominated approaches to disease in favor of prevention.

Need recommendations for good websites on specific health topics? Leave your questions in the comments!

A Year of Notable Setbacks: Columnist Ellen Goodman celebrates Women’s Equality Day — the anniversary of Aug. 26, 1920, when the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote became law — with the Equal Rites Awards, her annual tribute to “those who have labored over the last 12 months to set back the cause of women.” Among the many highlights:

Patriarch of the Year Prize. It goes with disappointment to US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose opinion restricting abortions rested on the retro notion that women needed to be protected from “regret,” “grief,” and “sorrow,” even if it meant protecting them from their rights. We send the paternalistic justice a hook to bring him back to the 21st century.

and …

The Our Bodies/Our Daughters Award goes to Mattel. The folks who brought you Barbie are collaborating on a new line of make-up — for 6- to 9-year-olds. For this we award them and all their ilk a special cosmetic for the next year: egg on their face.

Plus: Gloria Feldt discovers it’s easier to find a card celebrating National Toilet Paper Day than women’s suffrage.

Pour Me Another Cup: “The caffeine in three cups of coffee or tea a day may help maintain mental sharpness in older women, but caffeine consumption appears to have no effect in men,” reports The New York Times. The study appears in the journal Neurology.

The Skinny on Hollywood: Rachel Abramowitz begins this L.A. Times story with a search for body fat in Hollywood. “It’s the 2007 MTV Movie Awards, and judging by the standards of the youth-obsessed network’s magenta carpet, blubber, let alone curves, or even softness is out of fashion. Girls — and I mean girls, given their lack of womanly heft, glide by.”

It’s a good story, but the photos meant to portray the shrinking body size of Hollywood stars manages to fetishize them at the same time — yet another indication that the incredible shrinking woman is something to envy.

“‘Glamour’ Editor To Lady Lawyers: Being Black Is Kinda A Corporate ‘Don’t'”: Just go read Jezebel — it’s all there.

New Primer on Health Care Costs: The Kaiser Family Foundation has released a primer on health care costs (PDF) that examines “the rapid growth in the nation’s health care costs since 1970, when the average growth in health spending exceeded the growth of the economy as a whole by an average of 2.5 percentage points.”

“It also examines the impact of health care costs on families, with insurance premiums rising 87% between 2000 and 2006, more than four times the growth in wages,” continues KFF. “The primer describes the types and sources of health care spending and the demographic factors associated with higher or lower levels of spending. It also discusses other factors that influence health care spending growth, including the use of new medical technology, population changes, and changes in disease prevalence.”

Human Trafficking and HIV: A United Nations report released Wednesday notes that tens of thousands of women forced to work as sex slaves in Asia are at risk of contracting HIV and spreading the virus, reports the AP. If nothing is done to stop human trafficking in the region, “there is just going to be an explosion” of infections, said Caitlin Wiesen of the United Nations Development Program. More from Reuters.

More Doctors Banning Vaginal Births After C-Sections: NPR’s “All Things Considered” last week covered the increase in the number of cesarean births, in part because more and more medical centers have policies against vaginal birth if the mother has already had a c-section.

Plus: Rachel points to CNN’s list of five ways to avoid a c-section.

Monkeys Use “Baby Talk” to Interact With Infants: And you thought only cutesy humans communicated this way. Researchers have found female rhesus monkeys on an island off the coast of Puerto Rico use special vocalizations while interacting with infants, too. When a baby wanders away from its mother, the other female monkeys use the vocalizations, suggesting they are trying to get the infant’s attention.

“The acoustic structure of particular monkey vocalizations called girneys may be adaptively designed to attract young infants and engage their attention, similar to how the acoustic structure of human motherese, or baby talk, allows adults to visually or socially engage with infants,” said Dario Maestripieri, associate professor in comparative human development at the University of Chicago. The study, “Intended Receivers and Functional Significance of Grunt and Girney Vocalizations in Free-Ranging Rhesus Macaques,” appears in the journal Ethology.

Women’s eNews held its sixth annual 21 Leaders for the 21st Century gala earlier this week.

Check out the amazing honorees — “Seven Who Will Not Be Stopped,” “Seven Who Exert the Power of Their Voice,” and “Seven Who Stake Our Claim to the Future” — and read editor Rita Henley Jensen’s preview of the event.

Video interviews with each of the 21 Leaders will be posted on the Women’s eNews website next month.

- Inspired by the case of Kathy Sierra and by two recent research studies, Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post looks at how threats and general harassment are affecting women writers on the web — and how their intensity and frequency seems to be increasing:

Men are harassed too, and lack of civility is an abiding problem on the Web. But women, who make up about half the online community, are singled out in more starkly sexually threatening terms — a trend that was first evident in chat rooms in the early 1990s and is now moving to the blogosphere, experts and bloggers said.

A 2006 University of Maryland study on chat rooms found that female participants received 25 times as many sexually explicit and malicious messages as males. A 2005 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that the proportion of Internet users who took part in chats and discussion groups plunged from 28 percent in 2000 to 17 percent in 2005, entirely because of the exodus of women. The study attributed the trend to “sensitivity to worrisome behavior in chat rooms.”

Joan Walsh, editor in chief of the online magazine Salon, said that since the letters section of her site was automated a year and a half ago, “it’s been hard to ignore that the criticisms of women writers are much more brutal and vicious than those about men.”

Arianna Huffington summarizes the dilemma succinctly to Nakashima when she says that the anonymity of the world allows “a lot of those dark prejudices toward women to surface.”

Plus: Lucinda Marshall has more with “Silences Redux”

- A new edition of the Scholar & Feminist Online has just been posted: “Blogging Feminism: (Web)Sites of Resistance,” co-edited by Jessica Valenti and Gwendolyn Beetham, features articles by feminist scholars on cyberactivism and online movement making; women and politics in the blogosphere; gender disparity and web access; and building online communities. The publication, created by the Barnard Center for Research on Women, includes a first-ever blog portion.

- Dana Goldstein at Campus Progress points to an easy way to determine how many times the words “he” and “she” appear on a website. The findings, of course, are skewed in part by a reliance on using “he” in gender neutral contexts, along with the higher percentage of men in the news. I wonder, though, if the only sites where “she” ranks higher than “he” are woman-centered websites, like this one.

Viagra’s new ad campaign (only shown in Canada at the moment) is acting as a microcosm of everything wrong with the unfettered marketing of pharmaceuticals.

For the duration of the ad, men and women talk in a made-up language. Among the suggestive winks and nods, only the repeated word “Viagra” is comprehensible. From The New York Times:

“Viagra spanglecheff?” says a man to a friend at a bowling alley.

“Spanglecheff?” his friend asks.

“Minky Viagra noni noni boo-boo plats!” the first man replies, with a grin that suggests he is not talking about the drug’s side effects. The ads end with the slogan, “The International Language of Viagra.”

An executive from the advertising firm that created the ad bluntly admits, “It’s not as though we need to tell people what it does, because they already know. Consumers can fill in the blank for themselves.”

To that sentiment Dr. Sidney World, director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, responds, “In an ideal world, companies would have to sell drugs based on accurate and balanced information. That doesn’t seem to work well enough, so instead of that they’re substituting gibberish.”

Check out these titles for some good reading:

Full Frontal Feminism: Interviews with Jessica Valenti, executive editor of Feministing.com and author of the new “Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters,” ran last week at AlterNet, Salon and New York magazine.

Huffington Post is running a book excerpt, along with Valenti’s touching explanation for why the book is dedicated to “Miss Magoo.” And Valenti’s six-point manifesto for becoming a feminist is posted at The Guardian. In it she writes:

“I wanted to write the book I wish I’d read as a teenager. A book that would cut through the nonsense stereotypes and tell it like it is. A book that would talk about how amazing it is to be a feminist. And how necessary. Because I truly do believe that feminism is necessary for women to live happy, fulfilled lives — especially given the society we live in, which constantly and consistently tells women that we’re just not good enough.”

Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: Courtney Martin, a contributor to Feministing.com and other media outlets, is getting lots of press for “Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body.”

Writing in The New York Times, Holly Brubach calls it, “a smart and spirited rant that makes for thought-provoking reading.”

“She opens with some sobering statistics,” continues Brubach, “seven million American girls and women with eating disorders, and up to 70 million people worldwide.”

Brubach goes on to quote from the book: “Ninety-one percent of women recently surveyed on a college campus reported dieting; 22 percent of them dieted ‘always’ or ‘often.’ In 1995, 34 percent of high-school-age girls in the United States thought they were overweight. Today, 90 percent do.”

How Sassy Changed My Life: Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer, co-authors of “How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time,” appeared on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” last week to discuss the magazine described on the program as the “antithesis of the homecoming queen, please-your-boyfriend culture. It published articles about suicide and STDs while Seventeen was still teaching girls how to get a boy to notice you.”

NPR has also published an excerpt from “How Sassy Changed My Life.” More at Venus and Media Bistro.

Just call her E.J. Graff, feminist myth-buster.

After debunking the idea that women in huge numbers were “opting out” of the workplace for a more domestic life, Graff, a senior researcher at the Brandeis Institute for Investigative Journalism, is now taking on the media’s latest construction: the “Mommy War Machine.”

Graff identifies a number of recent articles and talk-show topics that resurrect a long-standing story: the “juicy tale of mothers who work and moms who stay home, dissing each other on playgrounds and in school parking lots with junior-high-level bile.”

But this war is a fiction: “The ballyhooed Mommy Wars exist mainly in the minds — and the marketing machines — of the media and publishing industry, which have been churning out mom vs. mom news flashes since, believe it or not, the 1950s. All while the number of working mothers has been rising.”

Listen to Graff talk about “The Mommy War Machine” on Monday’s edition of NPR’s “Talk of the Nation.”

Plus: “Ask This,” a project of the Neiman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, is running a series by Graff that suggests ways for reporters and editors to focus on what Ruth Rosen has called the “care crisis” in America. Here’s part one, part two and part three.

Kaiser Network has put together a comprehensive list of news and commentary published in response to the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling upholding the federal law banning so-called “partial-birth” abortion.

The list includes summaries of 17 editorials and six opinion pieces, along with links to eight separate television, radio and online news stories and discussions — it’s a great overview.

Pregnant Need Not Apply: “A record 4,901 pregnancy discrimination complaints were filed nationwide with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and state and local fair employment practices agencies in fiscal year 2006. That is a 23 percent increase since 1997, making it one of the fastest-growing workplace bias complaints, according to federal officials,” reports the Baltimore Sun. The number of complaints may be much higher, according to an EEOC official, because many women are reluctant to file a complaint.

Shortage of Obstetricians in Japan: “Since losing its last obstetrician five years ago, this city [Tono] of nearly 32,000 in rural northern Japan has been desperately seeking a replacement. So desperately, in fact, that it recently promised a horse to any obstetrician willing to come here,” reports The New York Times. “There have been no takers yet. In the meantime, the city has adopted a high-tech measure that may portend the future of child delivery in Japan: pregnant women are examined remotely by obstetricians using real-time data transmitted to the doctors’ cellphones.”

Costly Contraceptives: Contraception costs recently jumped ridiculously high on college campuses, thanks to a deficit-reduction bill Congress passed in 2005 that took effect this year. A New York Times editorial argues in favor of restoring exemptions from Medicaid pricing rules so drug companies can sell contraceptives and other products “to certain charitable groups, like the college clinics, at an extreme discount.”

Conference on Sex Differences and Health: The Organization for the Study of Sex Differences is holding its first annual conference May 9-12 in Washington, D.C. Questions that will be addressed include: Why do most autoimmune diseases affect more women than men? Why does lung cancer vary between the sexes in progression and responsiveness to treatment? How do women and men respond differently to pain and analgesics?

OSSD was established in partnership with the Society for Women’s Health Research, which recently published this article about women’s exclusion from medical research studies, right up through 1990.

Health Coverage For All, Almost: “Massachusetts is poised to become the first state to make it possible for 99 percent of its adults to be covered by health insurance, with an ambitious plan that sets limits for the premiums people would be expected to pay,” reports The New York Times. More from the Boston Globe.

All Things Imus: There’s been some great responses to the Imus controversy. I’ve posted a number of links here; coverage from throughout the week can be found under the “representations of women” index.

The Aftermath of “My Humps”: Writing for Broadsheet, Raquel Hecker notes that Fergie totally appreciated Alanis Morissette’s remake, but that doesn’t mean we’ll be spared more retro lyrics.

“Get Smart” Gets Real: “The new Get Smart movie has to contend with two big changes from the original 1965 TV show: the fall of communism and the rise of feminism,” reports USA Today. Look for a newly empowered Agent 99, played by Anne Hathaway. Steve Carell stars as Maxwell Smart.

The Fantasies of Straight Women: Add Ironing Board?: “The [Cambridge Women's Pornography Cooperative] says that when it comes to pornography, what really turns women on is men who clean the bathroom without being asked, or make a gourmet dinner, or bring home flowers for no reason, or volunteer to watch the kids,” reports the San Diego Union-Tribune. Those fantasies, involving some muscular guys posed by photographer Susan Alexander, play out in “Porn for Women” (Chronicle Books, $12.95).

Letter Fueled Feminist Fire: “After all these years, it is time to respond to the numerous letters to the editor regarding the so-called ‘radical feminist movement,’ submitted by Vern Hegenbart,” begins this letter in The Lacrosse Tribune written by Amy Belling-Dunn and Kate Belling. A great response!

Props to Time magazine for adding the following correction to the story “A Pro-Choice Movement in Mexico,” which, as we noted earlier this week, contained some pretty misleading information about emergency contraception:

The original version of this story inaccurately described morning-after pills being distributed free by Chilean President Michelle Bachelet as “abortion-inducing.” Though pro-life advocates claim the pills effect a kind of abortion by preventing a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus in the first 72 hours after unprotected sex, the pills are more accurately considered an emergency contraception by the medical community since they technically prevent a pregnancy from occurring in the first place.

OK, so it’s difficult to comprehend how the phrase “a kind of abortion” made it into that sentence when it’s clearly an opinion the medical community does not support. Or, for the matter, how the original story make it past the editors in the first place. But hey, it’s still good to see Time respond.

Jessica at Feministing points to a big error in this Time magazine article, “A Pro-Choice Movement in Mexico.” The story provides a very good overview of abortion politics in Latin America, but the writer unfortunately makes a reference to “abortion-inducing ”morning-after’ contraception pills,” which completely misrepresents the purpose and usage of emergency contraception:

Underground abortions are one of the leading causes of maternal mortality in Chile. Although Chile has one of South America’s strictest anti-abortion codes, it’s estimated to have twice as many abortions each year (200,000) as Canada — a country with twice Chile’s population. (Abortion is legal in Canada.) As a result, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, a socialist, late last year sanctioned the free distribution of abortion-inducing “morning-after” contraception pills at government-run hospitals. In a nation where three-fourths of the public say they oppose liberalizing the abortion law — which, like Nicaragua’s, bars abortion in all circumstances, even in cases of rape or when the mother’s life is in danger — women’s rights groups concede Bachelet’s contraceptive tack was the most legally and politically feasible for now.

As Kate D., a commenter at Feministing, writes: “you start to feel like bill murray in Groundhog Day…how many times do we have to go over this??”

Time for a re-cap. From the excellent Emergency Contraception Website, operated by the Office of Population Research at Princeton University and by the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals: Does emergency contraception cause an abortion?

No, using emergency contraceptive pills (also called “morning after pills” or “day after pills”) prevents pregnancy after sex. It does not cause an abortion. (In fact, because emergency contraception helps women avoid getting pregnant when they are not ready or able to have children, it can reduce the need for abortion.)

Emergency contraceptive pills or the IUD as emergency contraception work before pregnancy begins. According to leading medical authorities — such as the National Institutes of Health and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists — pregnancy begins when the fertilized egg implants in the lining of a woman’s uterus. Implantation begins five to seven days after sperm fertilizes the egg, and the process is completed several days later. Emergency contraception will not work if a woman is already pregnant, and it also will not harm the woman or her fetus.

The way emergency contraceptive pills work depends on where you are in your monthly cycle when you take them. They may prevent or delay ovulation (release of your egg), affect the movement of egg or sperm (making them less likely to meet), interfere with the fertilization process, or prevent implantation of a fertilized egg. The copper in Copper-T IUDs can prevent sperm from fertilizing an egg and may also prevent implantation of a fertilized egg.

If you want to pass this along to Time, just click on the reporter’s name at the top of the story to open a letter-to-the-editor window.

A new study (PDF) found that hormone therapy may pose less of a risk of coronary heart disease if taken by women in their 50s or within 10 years of starting menopause. But for women in their 60s and 70s, hormone therapy is still believed to increase the risk of heart disease.

The new analysis was published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It builds on the research gathered during the Women’s Health Initiative study.

The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal published very different stories on the latest research. The WSJ played it up on page one, under the headline “New Study Reassures Most Users of Hormones” (subscriber only), while the Times ran a more cautious story on page A10, “Health Risk to Older Women Is Seen in Hormone Therapy.”

Wading through all the hormone research can be a confusing — and frustrating — endeavor. The National Women’s Health Network has done an excellent job of summarizing the most recent study and discussing what it means for women in the menopausal transition. The NWHN statement also notes the various ways in which the new analysis has either confirmed or left unaffected previous WHI conclusions.

For more information, check out the “Our Bodies, Ourselves” section on menopause and hormone therapy, as well as our general resources on midlife and menopause.

by Elana Hayasaka, OBOS Publications Program Assistant

In many places like rural Nigeria, a book like “Our Bodies, Ourselves” may be limited in its usefulness because of low literacy levels and a lack of access to books. But a local enterprising women’s group found a different way to share the important health information contained in the books with other women — they hop on motorbikes, grab megaphones, and ride from village to village with megaphones blaring.

Last weekend, some of the OBOS staff attended the Women, Action and Media! conference (see the post from last week) and presented a panel on adapting our book into different formats to reach out to different communities and populations of women, such as the villagers in Nigeria. Or slightly closer to home, social networking profiles (like MySpace) and even this blog were created to help spread medical information to younger women who may not turn to a reference book like “Our Bodies, Ourselves” for medical information as readily as their mothers once did.

And speaking of sharing information with other women, a group of filmmakers at the conference also proved how the power of film can reach out, engage, and educate people about health issues in ways a book cannot. These women included:

* Margaret Lazarus, who has created a number of powerful films about domestic violence, including the Oscar winning documentary Defending Our Lives.

* Laurel Greenberg,who discussed her films, including 94 Years and 1 Nursing Home Later, which explores her grandmother’s story and the difficult journey taken by many from caretaker parent to dependent elder.

* Aishah Simmons, who showed clips from her moving film about rape, No!

For more coverage of this year’s WAM! conference, please visit Campus Progress and Feministing (look for posts from March 31-April 1).

I’m leaving today for Boston, for the annual Women, Action & the Media conference — better known as WAM! Check out all the sessions and presenters here.

The OBOS panel — Our 21st Century Bodies, Our Multimedia Selves — is Saturday at 11 a.m. and features Ayesha Chaterjee, global translation & adaptation program assistant; Elana Hayasaka, publications program assistant; Akilah Jefferson, former OBOS intern and current graduate student at Georgetown University; and yours truly.

At 2 p.m. I’m leading a build-your-own-blog workshop, followed by Deanna Zandt‘s fast take on web 2.0 and empowering communities through online tools.

Anyone else heading to WAM!?

Echidne has written a very smart post on feminism and health research:

Do you remember the big fuss the media made over the 1999 study by Kawachi and others which found that greater gender equality appeared to be correlated with better health for both sexes in the United States? How about the even bigger media fuss caused by the 2005 study by Chen and others which found that gender equality appeared to be correlated with better mental health for women? And surely you remember the excitement in the media last year when we all learned about the Swedish study which showed that both men and women have better health when roles are shared more equally at home?

You don’t recall? Neither do I, because there was no such fuss at all. Studies with those findings are not mentioned in the popular media at all or only fleetingly. But when a Swedish study in 2007 suggests that greater gender equality leads to less health for both sexes, what happens? You guessed it. The media is on the study right away …

Echidne not only sounds off on the possibilities for why anti-feminist studies receive high amounts of media attention, but she also points out the flaws in the recent Swedish study that rocked Rush Limbaugh’s world.

Plus: While you’re at it, also read Echidne’s Guide On How To Interpret Research – Again.

And here’s a related post I wrote last month about how the Chicago Tribune determines which medical studies get front-page coverage.