A study from Lucile Packard Children's Hospital and the Stanford University School of Medicine shows that health websites that have sexual health information for teens are often "riddled with errors and omissions."
Lead researcher Sophia Yen, MD, said, "Even widely trusted sites like WebMD are not that accurate when it comes to adolescent reproductive health...Teens should be cautious about finding sexual health answers on the Web."
About half of the Web sites, including such highly trafficked destinations as Wikipedia and Mayoclinic.com, failed to provide accurate, complete information about emergency contraception, also known as "the morning-after pill." For instance, sites often failed to say that minors can buy emergency contraception from authorized pharmacists in nine states, and many sites did not correct the myth that emergency contraception causes an abortion.
So where can young people find accurate sexual health info? The research team found that the most reliable sites are Go Ask Alice, the Center for Young Women's Health, TeensHealth, and Planned Parenthood's Teen Wire.
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I think a lot of adult women would trust information sources like the Mayo Clinic and Wikipedia, as well. It's a systemic problem with sexual health information that impacts everyone looking for answers.
Scarleteen is also a very good site from what I remember.
Crazyness. What about Scarleteen? I love that website.
If you click on the link in the sidebar labeled "Poster of Sophia Yen's Research Results," Scarleteen is listed under "Sexual Health Websites" in the Methods section. There aren't specific results listed though, so I guess you would have to find the study to find out how Scarleteen specifically ranked.
Sex, Etc. www.sexetc.org is a great one too!
I'm in a campus sexual health educators group. Some of the info they teach is off, too - I try and point it out, but it's "in the curriculum". People assume the basics never change, so they don't update materials like they should (also, the political aspects of much of this change often). But my group is all "always make sure it's latex! Or that other plastic one", and getting people to remember "polyurethane" is a challenge. (They're not pressing people to use latex because they want to be aware of it for allergy risks, but because it "works better". The reasoning is kind of dated.)
Also, they refuse get annoyed if I say STI - "it's an STD, saying STI is just all that pc crap"
www.sexualityandu.ca and www.spiderbytes.ca are both accurate sexual health sites for Canadian teens! They helped me out a lot when I was a little younger.
Advocatesforyouth.org is also great-and the Kaiser Family Foundation
As a doctor working at Mayo and referring patients to Mayo's website, I was immediately worried that there was misinformation on the website. However, I looked MayoClinic.com's page on emergency contraception, and didn't see either of those two cited errors. Perhaps there are errors that I am missing?
Thanks!
While searching for a useful website after my 310-202, I came across your website and found it the perfect for me. Your above post is really a useful post for teenagers. I am fully agree with you that Sexual health websites for teens spread misinformation that are harmful for teenagers. So the teens should be careful about such kind of websites.
My favorite:
www.goaskalice.columbia.edu
They encourage people to decide for themselves what's right and wrong, and then gives them the information they need to act on those choice. They take a lot of flack for it.
This is a good example:
http://www.goaskalice.columbia.edu/1471.html
Titled: "Excellent site, but could you take out the gay stuff?"
I always read my older siblings' biology books. That works. You could say biology books aren't accessible/easy enough to read for teens, but in 7th grade I had college level reading comprehension, so I'm not about to put it past any teen.
I am a Safe Space Maintainer there, so I might be a little biased, but I think Vagina Pagina (also http://www.vaginapagina.com) is great.