Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Medical Porn

From Medscape:
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) Apr 17 - A study suggests that dermatology images available online are sometimes being used pruriently. Moreover, pornography and fetish websites seem to be a major source of referral, researchers report in the April issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.
The thought that DermAtlas, a searchable archive of clinical photography, was being misused first occurred to the curators when they noticed a marked jump in queries for images containing genital sites.

The bulk of searches -- 62% -- involved queries for a specific diagnosis. Of these, 12% involved a genital site. Of the 11% of requests for an anatomic site, 37% involved a genital site. Twelve percent of the 10,000 free text queries were for images containing a genital site.
In searches that specified both an age group and an anatomic site, images involving children were 48% more likely to be requested than those involving an adult.
An analysis of the top 43 referring sites to DermAtlas revealed that 9 (21%) were pornographic/fetish sites. However, these sites only accounted for 14.3% of all 141,285 referrals.
The authors conclude that "Developers of online clinical image libraries containing potentially sensitive health information on topics such as sexuality and anatomy must be aware of issues beyond technical and domain knowledge."

No, I will not provide a link to the DermAtlas.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I would be happy to forward them the porn spam I get on a daily basis. It's bound to be better than the Dermatology websites. Weird.