How can InformedHealth.org help?

Each of our topics describes the risks and possible consequences of the medical condition. It would be impossible to decide whether or not to have treatment without this basic information.

When presenting risks, we also make sure that we report frequencies, such as how likely it is that the medical condition will lead to a particular consequence. But it's often difficult to find exact figures for these risks, and sometimes only rough estimates are possible. This often leaves uncertainty. But we have decided not to withhold these figures because they can still provide important information.

We also make an effort to not make any assumptions concerning how people feel about the possible risks and consequences of a condition. It is up to you to decide how concerned you are about a particular risk.

When we produce our information we summarize the main possible courses of action. Our selection is based on a variety of scientific sources. We mostly describe treatments that have been looked at in scientific studies and interventions that are used in Germany.

We believe that scientific research offers a fundamental basis for making health-related decisions because it is likely to provide the most realistic picture of the benefits and harms of treatments or interventions.

For a fair comparison of medical interventions, you usually need scientific studies. Because different studies can come to different conclusions, it often makes sense to use summaries of the available good-quality studies.

For this reason, we look for what are known as “systematic reviews” when we want to find out the advantages and disadvantages of different treatments. The results of these reviews are the most reliable sources of information on the current state of knowledge.

Unlike other health information providers or newspaper articles, we often conclude that a treatment has not yet been shown to have clear advantages and disadvantages, or has not been studied enough. Many people prefer to follow recommendations, so our approach may be less satisfying. It is, however, usually more realistic than advice that isn’t based on scientific evidence. It's also important to present figures carefully so that the effects of a treatment aren’t overestimated or underestimated.

We only make statements about the benefits and harms of a treatment if it has actually been studied well enough for the results to be reliable. This ensures that our information is as reliable and correct as possible.

Yet it often turns out that only a few – or even none – of the available treatments have been well studied. This is frustrating for us too, but we would still rather describe this uncertainty than create a false sense of certainty.

Another important reason why we don't usually make recommendations on InformedHealth.org is this: We see the step of weighing the pros and cons of a treatment as one that you need to take yourself. Our wish is to provide you with all the information you need in order to make a decision about a medical issue. In doing so, we try to keep it neutral. Because InformedHealth.org is independent and ad-free, we also have no interest in making specific treatments appear to be better than they are.

On InformedHealth.org you will frequently find statements like: "If 100 people take the medication, 5 out of them will benefit from it." But nobody can predict who will be one of the 5 people who benefit from it or one of the 95 who do not. The same is true when we try to predict whether side effects will occur.

Medicine usually deals with information based on probabilities, which doesn’t make individual decisions any easier: There is never a guarantee that the decision you make is will be the right decision. A certain amount of uncertainty is normal.

When we choose which health-related questions to answer in our information, we try to cover areas we assume are interesting to our readers and helpful for making a decision. This is why, when choosing which topics to cover, we also use qualitative studies in which patients are asked things like what aspects of their condition are important to them.