Letter to the Editor
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2020. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Orthop. Oct 18, 2020; 11(10): 473-474
Published online Oct 18, 2020. doi: 10.5312/wjo.v11.i10.473
Trochanteric bursitis information on the internet; can we trust the information presented?
Richard Tyrrell, Martin Kelly, Cian Kennedy
Richard Tyrrell, Martin Kelly, Cian Kennedy, Department of Trauma and Orthopaedics, University Hospital Limerick, Limerick V94 F858, Ireland
Author contributions: Tyrrell R and Kelly M worked on this paper with the support of Mr. Kennedy.
Conflict-of-interest statement: We have read and signed the Conflict of interest statement in full and see attached document.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Richard Tyrrell, MD, Doctor, Department of Trauma and Orthopaedics, University Hospital Limerick, St Nessan's Road, Dooradoyle, Limerick V94 F858, Ireland. richard.tyrrell@hse.ie
Received: July 3, 2020
Peer-review started: July 3, 2020
First decision: August 22, 2020
Revised: September 4, 2020
Accepted: September 27, 2020
Article in press: September 27, 2020
Published online: October 18, 2020
Processing time: 106 Days and 20.4 Hours
Abstract

Trochanteric bursitis is one of the most common causes of lateral hip pain in adults. The prevalence of unilateral trochanteric bursitis is 15.0% in women and 8.5% in men. Access to internet based information has increased dramatically and health related information is now one of the most popular searches in online activity, despite this the quality of information can vary. The objective of this paper is to examine the quality and readability of internet based information of trochanteric bursitis. Overall, we have found a high variability among not only the quality but also the readability of information published. Websites that appeared first on each search engine for trochanteric bursitis did not necessarily score better, demonstrating the importance of providing patients with high quality resources. Future articles should use more critical appraisal tools in order to provide the reader with more high quality and readable information.

Keywords: Internet; Quality; Readability; DISCERN; Journal of American Medical Association; Flesh Reading Ease

Core Tip: From this study, we note that there is a large variance in the information available on the internet, health care workers should be aware of this, should educate patient’s about the large variance of quality of medical information on the internet and should direct patients who are looking for further information to the relevant websites.