Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: At present patients and relatives garner more knowledge through website rather than direct interaction with the Consultant physician. We aimed at assessing whether Indian website about Endocrine Surgery matched with their counterpart abroad.

Materials and methods: We identified two most searched Endocrine Surgery website world wide and 10 endocrine surgerywebsite maintained by trained Endocrine Surgeons (three years training leading to award of Superspeciality degree) from India. The website parameters and Number of hits, demographic data of website, rank and other parameters were assessed using professional website (www.Alexa.com). An Endocrine surgeon along with a technical website advisor rated the content, presentation and likesfrom a scale of 1 to 5. (1-minimum score and 5 maximum score).

Results: We analysed 10 Indian and 2 website from outside India. Fisher exact test was used to test the association between websites (India/Abroad) and individual variables. Results shows that there was no significant association Website(India/Abroad) and Thyroid facts, Parathyroid Facts, Adrenal, Pancreas, Photographs, videos, Publications, Landscape of website, Quality, Presentation of website, Number of views, Gender of person viewing thewebsite and age group of person (P>0.05), while there was significant association with Post-operative advise as well as complications (P<0.05).

Conclusion: Most parameters were comparable in both groups.But the complication rate was not available in many websites. Post operative advice was present in only few websites. The advantage of these website is that patient can gather much needed information and also save much of unneeded discussion with physician and also save on second consultation. Indian websites regarding endocrine surgery is comparable to other countries except the complications are not highlighted and post op advise not found.