Can Americans trust health-related government agencies to provide accurate information?

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Library of Medicine (NLM) websites direct visitors to a MedlinePlus website, which uses interactive tutorials from the Patient Education Institute, Inc (PEI). The featured hysterectomy tutorial is rife with misinformation that is largely unsupported by anatomical fact.

“Gundersen Lutheran and many other healthcare entities subscribe to this service,” said Charlotte C. Grant, Patient Education Content Specialist at the Gundersen Lutheran Health Center in La Crosse, Wisconsin, “including MedLine Plus, one of the most widely used and respected online medical information services available today.”

MedlinePlus claims that this tutorial is “trusted health information” that is a service of the NIH and NLM. PEI says that this lesson in health education is becoming the “standard of care” in the medical industry. Women should be able to rely on information from our most trusted health information resources, but that is not the case.

PEI claims that this information will help hospitals like Gundersen “document patient education and informed consent.” This potentially dangerous tutorial that may be used to demonstrate informed consent requires women to agree with their misinformation and false statements in order to complete the tutorial.

The HERS Foundation exposes this serious risk to the public at http://hysterectomyinformation.blogspot.com/.