Dietary and herbal supplements for weight loss: assessing the quality of patient information online
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Given the high prevalence of dietary and herbal supplement (DHS) use in tandem with the growing ease of internet access, patients commonly search online for consumer health information about these products. One common reason for DHSs use includes weight loss. Healthcare providers need to be aware of the quality of online information about DHSs for weight loss so they can adequately counsel their patients and provide them with guidance surrounding the identification of high-quality information resources. This study aimed to assess the quality of online DHSs consumer health information for weight loss that a "typical" patient might access online. METHODS: Six search terms were used to generate the first 20 websites on the Google search engine in four countries: Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States (n = 480 websites). After applying exclusion criteria, eligible websites were quality assessed using the DISCERN instrument. This tool is comprised of 16 questions, each evaluated on a 5-point scale. The averages and standard deviations for each DISCERN instrument item, in addition to overall summed scores between 15 and 75 were calculated. RESULTS: Across 87 eligible websites, the mean summed score was 44.80 (SD = 11.53), while the mean overall DISCERN score of each website was 2.72 (SD = 0.99). In general, websites detailed and achieved their specified aims and described treatment benefits. However, most websites failed to describe the impact of treatment on overall quality of life and the impact of a no treatment option. The highest-scoring websites were largely government or health portal websites, while the lowest-scoring websites were largely commercial in nature. CONCLUSION: High variability in DISCERN instrument scores was found across all websites assessed. Healthcare providers should be aware of the fact that their patients may be accessing misinformation online surrounding the use of DHSs for weight loss. Therefore, it is important for healthcare providers to ensure that they are providing their patients with guidance on how to identify high-quality resources online, in order that safe, effective, and evidence-based decisions are made surrounding the use of DHSs for weight loss.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".