Study finds more than four-fifths of consumers have sought healthcare advice online

NEW YORK A majority of Internet users have visited Web sites for health-care information, according to a Nielsen Online survey released Tuesday.

The survey, which fielded questions to 1,000 people during the second three months of this year, found that 83 percent of respondents have sought health information on web sites. Family physicians remained the most trusted health-care resource, but frequent users of social networking sites consult a wider range of information, online as well as offline.

The results are similar to those of a Pew Internet Project survey earlier this month, in which 75 percent of respondents said they seek health and medical information online.

At the same time, almost a quarter of respondents to the Nielsen survey are “ad unaware,” meaning they could not identify drugs to treat insomnia and high cholesterol out of a list of the top 15 brands, ranked by spending on advertising. Sixty-three percent of ad-unaware respondents were likely to seek health-care information online, compared to the overall figure of 83 percent, but more likely to consult print media and social-networking sites.

Despite this, health-care professionals remain the first source of information for most patients, regardless of their conditions’ severity, and more than 80 percent of respondents trust their physicians.

Meanwhile, almost one-third of respondents use social networking Web sites frequently.

“Although we did ask consumers about social networking participation, we did not intend to focus on social networkers as a segment,” Nielsen health-care research director Melissa Davies said. “However, when we took a look at the results, we realized that we had an interesting group here one that is influential and that can be influenced because of their intense information-gathering tendencies.”

Nielsen said social network users are an important target group for markets because they tend to gather and disseminate information more broadly than people who use less sophisticated Web services. They search more widely for health-care information than average consumers as well, turning to print sources, friends and family in addition to the Internet.