Wikipedia isn’t your doctor

Don’t get me wrong—I love Wikipedia. Like many people, I suspect, I can’t remember how I lived without it. But a new study shows that while it may be a good source of many things, detailed information on medications isn’t one of them.

A team of researchers looked at Wikipedia entries on 80 drugs. While they found few factual errors, they were concerned by the amount of omissions in entries—for instance, an entry may have had no information on potential drug interactions—and they say that these omissions are just as dangerous as errors.

So when researching health information, by all means, start with Wikipedia. Just don’t finish there.

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