PAUSE for Your Health: A New End-User Tool for Evaluating Consumer Health News and Online Resources

ABSTRACT

Society is in the midst of an infodemic – an overwhelming amount of inaccurate health information is circulating online. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the infodemic which was already fueled by the general mistrust of traditional credible sources, particularly the media and health professionals. ChatGPT is further upending the information landscape. Librarians are trusted professionals who can help ease the impacts of the infodemic, however we need a simple yet not overly simplified consumer health evaluation tool to help us teach people how to evaluate health information in their daily lives. The authors present the “PAUSE for Your Health” tool designed specifically for this purpose. The tool combines the simplicity of a checklist with the robust critical thinking of a framework to encourage end-users to pause, consider attributes of the source, and then decide if this source is beneficial to their health before following the advice or sharing the information.

KEYWORDS:

• Information literacy
• consumer health news
• website evaluation
• reference
• misinformation management

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).