Informação sobre saúde bucal nas plataformas digitais: entre crença e ciência

Abstract

The increase in the means of accessing information, particularly over the internet, makes it easier for people to seek information on health and illness. This includes symptoms, diagnoses, tests, treatments, medications and other items. In dentistry, it can be noticed that the search and use of information from the Internet may interfere with the patients’ knowledge about certain subjects, but this does not seem to allow commonsense beliefs and prejudices to be eradicated. The objective of this research is to evaluate the search and use of information about oral health on digital platforms and its consequences on the dentist-patient relationship, on the validation of statements, on the dissemination of fake news and on people’s daily lives. This is an exploratory and descriptive study with a cross-sectional outline and a quali-quantitative approach that applies a questionnaire with the same content equivalence to two groups: one comprising patients/people with little knowledge on dentistry and another composed of dental surgeons. The results reveal an informational asymmetry and that the perceptions that professionals and patients have of health and illness are different. In conclusion, oral health information on digital platforms is generic and seems to be volatile. Therefore, it is considered necessary to create conditions for the search and use of health information to include filtering and selection of sources that are committed to truthfulness and ethics.