Unfortunately, several diseases out there still don’t have a cure. Most of them have symptoms which will affect people’s lives to a certain (sometimes extreme) degree. Some of them can be very annoying, crippling, or simply terrifying. Some of them, for example, are sarcoidosis, tinnitus, genital and oral herpes, asthma, myasthenia gravis, menopause, and so on. People with such conditions are especially vulnerable and more willing to be gullible, since they often feel that the medical world “fails them”.

The Internet made available an amazing wealth of information about those conditions. However, a lot of people out there are in for the quick buck, at the expenses of those exhausted sufferers who are sometimes willing to believe anything.

This article will give you simple advice which will help to make it easy to find out if the information you are reading on the Internet is genuine or not.

Google is your friend

Google is a fantastic search engine. Unfortunately, it works well for everybody—including for those people who tend to provide information on “magic cures” for $19.95. On the other hand, Google is your best weapon to understand if you really can trust the information you find online. Google won’t decide for you. However, it will give you a chance to make an informed decision.

So, here is how to use Google as a weapon against untrustworthy sites.

Technique #1: text fingerprinting

Suppose you have genital herpes, and you find this site: http://www.genitalherpescured.com/. While the site doesn’t look extremely professional, it does give anybody with herpes at least some hope. Suppose that you want to find out if the site is genuine or not. The first step is to look for a sentence in the site’s content that is very unlikely to be in other sites out there.

In this case, I will take the sentence “60 Year Old Swinger Reveals”. This will be your “fingerprint”: something that distinguishes this particular page from others online.

Search this sentence in Google. It’s absolutely crucial that you search it with the speech marks around it.

Google fingerprinting in action

The results are shown in this figure:

Here are the sites:

• http://www.genitalherpescured.com/
• http://sclerodermadefeated.com/
• http://ganglioncystcure.com/
• http://www.laryngitiscured.com/

Clicking on those sites will give you a very strong deja-vu effect: they all seem extremely similar, based on the same template. More disturbingly, the woman in the photo (who is supposed to be the author of the document) seems to change her name from one template to the other:

Here she is Amy Archer…

…and here she is Maria Menendez!

Once you have found more sites, you can use other parts of the documents (which seem to stay the same) as your next fingerprint. For example, you could take “you are about to Learn the easy 3 Step” as your next fingerprint, and find:

• http://www.hivescure.com/

From there, you will notice that the text at the top has changed: it now has “Sex Crazed 60 Year Old Reveals” etc. Using that as your fingerprint will reveal more sites:

• http://www.lymediseasecured.com/
• http://www.anemiadefeated.com/
• http://www.menopausedefeated.com/

The list goes on and on. They all look incredibly alike, and there seem to be one of them for each annoying and hard-to-treat condition. This is a semi-complete list for this particular template:

• http://www.sarcoidosiscure.com/
• http://www.fibromyalgiacured.com/
• http://www.hivescure.com/
• http://www.menopausedefeated.com/
• http://refluxrecovery.com/
• http://www.asthmadefeated.com/
• http://myastheniagraviscure.com/
• http://www.genitalherpescured.com/
• http://www.laryngitiscured.com/
• http://ganglioncystcure.com/
• http://sclerodermadefeated.com/
• http://www.asthmadefeated.com/
• http://www.lymediseasecured.com/
• http://www.anemiadefeated.com/

This doesn’t tell you that the reports are necessarily fake. I am not saying it either! However, this information will at least inform your decision: has a person found a cure for all of those diseases, managing to keep the scientific community away from the discovery? Maybe, maybe not. It’s up to you to decide.

Fingerprinting might be a little bit harder than this in some cases: it depends on how hard the site makers were trying. Also, most site owners tend to make fingerprinting for their sites harder when an article like this one dissects them.

Technique 2: Checking the Internet sites

The beauty of the Internet is that anybody can put together a site and be, at least in theory, at the same level as big companies. This causes problems because it also means that unreliable sources, using made-up testimonials, can look as convincing as established sites in order to sell fake products.

In this case, telling if a source is reliable is a little harder. Take for example “sarcoidosis”: searching Google returns interesting results.

The search result of “sarcoidosis”

The best article I found is the one on [sarcoidosis in the NIH web site]( http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/dci/Diseases/sarc/sar_whatis.html) which has the following characteristics:

• It’s factual, rather than sensationalistic
• The language is formal and clean
• There are no spelling mistakes
• There are no changes in fonts, and no sentences in bold or bigger
• There are no prominent or bothering ads on the site
• It is not offering a cure
• It is not asking for money
• It doesn’t focus on one topic (saecoidosis); instead, it covers several related topics (in this case, “complete and dependable information about heart, lung, and blood diseases and sleep disorders”)
• It has official government logos at the bottom

There are also sites you can generally always trust:

• http://www.wikipedia.org — The famous online encyclopedia anybody can contribute to. Medical articles are renown to be accurate. A warning will point out any possible problems.
• http://www.merck.com — A pharmaceutical company which publishes several articles online
• http://www.webmd.com/ and http://www.medicinenet.com — Great sites for people into straight medicine
• any site that ends with .gov — They are generally government-maintained web sites. Their point of view tends to change slightly depending on the party in power in the US, but it’s generally objective.
• any site that ends with .edu — They are universities, which are mostly reliable

In general, you need to pay close attention to the site’s URL and to what it contains.

Beware of the words “secret”

The researching community is based on sharing information, discoveries and tests. This applies to all branches of healing. There is no secret in healing: there are numerous dedicated people researching and sharing what they discover, through medical journals or other official means. Medical doctors, acupuncturists, even reiki practitioners will share their knowledge with each other, to enhance the healing techniques and improve their skills. Discoveries and theories get peer-reviewed (in the case of scientific journals), or tested by several practitioners.

The only time you will see the word “secret”, is when somebody doesn’t want anybody to peer-review their work in fear of being proven plain wrong.

So, any “secret solution” to a commonly unsolvable problem is extremely likely to be a lie.

Do not pay money for “reports”, “booklets” etc.

This is a very important point. Many sites are created with this structure:

• Catchy sensationalistic introduction full of promises to catch your attention
• Some generic filling
• A “teaser” on what their special product does and how it works. Not enough to actually work out what it is
• Some testimonials
• Some more sensationalistic sentences
• An order form, with a “money-back guarantee” (good luck with that)

Beware of these sites. Again, while it’s possible that the booklet’s contents are actually valuable, most of the sites structured in this manner are just there to make a quick buck selling well-known information or—in the worst cases—useless cures which are only likely to work thanks to a placebo effect.

Beware of forum postings

People who are in for a quick buck will do anything to drive people to their web site. This includes:

• Posting a question to a forum
• Waiting a number of days
• Posting an answer with a fake account

As an example, have a look here:

• http://www.city-data.com/forum/health-wellness/202787-inexpensive-meds.html

The user john656 asks:

I am about to lose my coverage with my employer and just need something to cover my son’s medication. The prescription runs $120 per month but we have only been paying $10 under our health plan. My husband also takes medication, but his prescription is very affordable. What is available?

It seems a very legitimate question. Those forums are quite active, and quite a few people respond. Amongst the answers, evan_us56 says:

Well, I recently visited a site called ************ It is one of the best site on the net for gathering information about health insurance plans and news. There you can read many topics related to the health insurance which written by experts. I am sure you can get that what you want. Good luck!

That’s interesting. By using fingerprinting, and therefore by searching My husband also takes medication, but his prescription is very affordable. What is available? in Google, you discover that the very same question appears on another web site, by a different user:

http://www.justhealthtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1096

And again:

http://www.way2hope.org/family-forums/index.php?showtopic=811

And again:

http://www.stronghealthmag.com/node/38

Things get interesting if you type in Google link:healthinsurance-com.com: you find a number of posts:

• http://www.wellness.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=359
• http://forums.about.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?msg=61.2&nav=messages&webtag=ab-healthins
• http://christianforums.com/t6491730-economical-health-insurance-plan.html
• http://disabilityhelpsite.com/forum/index.php?topic=159.msg534
• http://www.aphroditewomenshealth.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=177495
• http://www.viablehealth.com/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?v-print/m-1195901034/
• http://training.fitness.com/wellness/economical-health-insurance-plan-29262.html

Could it be that different people are asking the very same question with the exact same wording, and for some reason are receiving the same answer again with the same wording? Could it be that the same person has the same problem over and over again, and creates different accounts in different forums? You be the (informed) judge.

Use your intuition

This is also very important. After reading this article, you should be able to make a much more informed decision about what you trust and what you don’t trust. However, eventually you will “just know”. Your brain will be able to work out these variables in no time, you will recognise the patterns at first sight. At that point, it will be a matter of trusting your intuition.

Conclusion

Hopefully this article will help people figure out what to trust and what not to trust in the Internet world. Usually, the Internet is regarded as the “wild west” of commerce, where the most amazing scams are carried out time after time. However, things have gotten a little harder over the last few years: Google is more and more selective in its search results, and the Internet users are becoming more and more capable to distinguish a quack from a genuine site. I don’t think anybody would ever buy vitamins (or, worse, drugs) from a fast-approaching guy in sunglasses and a suit in the street; for the same reason, more and more people are learning about the Internet and are distrusting web sites which are less deserving. The important thing, in the end, is to always make an informed choice.

Good luck!