Patients making use of internet search engines to discover medication for their problems or illnesses may end up getting incorrect or incomplete diagnoses.

According to the latest issue of the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, injuries get worsened when sufferers try their own treatments.

Data about the most common sports injuries changes widely in quality, according to the study, which discovered newspaper articles and personal websites the least precise sources of information.

Madhav A. Karunakar, an orthopaedic surgeon and study author said, "The reason that we decided to undertake this study is that patients are presenting to their physicians office with increasing frequency armed with printouts of information obtained from the internet."

"Physicians and patients should be aware that the quality of information available online varies greatly," he said, adding that quality contents over health information on the web have not grown at the same rate that internet use has.

The researchers selected 10 of the most common sports medicine diagnoses and examined the online data available on them.

Making use of the two most frequently used search engines including Google and Yahoo, the specialists reviewed the top 10 search results for each diagnosis, looking for completeness, correctness, and clarity of the information.

They also mentioned whether the site's owner was a non-profit organisation, news source, academic institution, individual, physician, or commercial enterprise.

In terms of content, Karunakar said, non-profit sites scored the highest, then academic sites (including medical journal sites), and then certain non-sales-oriented commercial sites.

Commercial sites such as those sponsored by companies selling a drug or treatment device were very common but frequently incomplete. (With Inputs from Agencies)