Washington, Oct 14 : Can social networking sites help people make healthy decisions? A new study says it depends on people's willingness to take action on the information they derive from the sites.

Using social networking sites to obtain health information and advice is controversial. Critics say the sites can confuse, give inaccurate information, or prevent people from seeking professional advice.

They doubt consumers can carry the burden of complex medical decisions, and worry that social networks can actually harm na? ve consumers by encouraging them to engage in self-diagnosis and self-treatment.

Rama K. Jayanti (Cleveland State University) and Jagdip Singh (Case Western Reserve University, who did his B. Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology in 1975) closely monitored use of an electronic bulletin board dedicated to thyroid disease and treatment over the course of 10 months.

Based on random selection, they analysed six threads representing 392 distinct postings with 7,825 text lines by 80 unique individuals. They sought to determine if consumers can learn from these sites, how they learn, and how the learning empowers them.

They found many benefits to using online communities for health advice. A three-stage process of reflecting, refining, and exploring is the key to effective use of the online sites, they say.

The value of the online community is that it "facilitates learning by collectively transforming everyday individual experiences into usable knowledge," they write.

"We found that the community can collectively enable learning for individual members who often fail and falter on their own," they added.

By pooling their experiences, participants enlarge their repertoire of actions that affect their health. "Together these characteristics transformed helpless individuals into empowered patients who effortlessly changed physicians, switched medications, and modified diets."

These results were published in the Journal of Consumer Research.(IANS)