Mary Greeley Medical Center, along with other health centers across the nation, is jumping on the technology bandwagon and making medical information available online.

The new technology, telemedicine, makes it possible to get medical advice online. Telemedicine uses interactive video and information transfers to make sure patients can stay in touch with their doctors.

In a time when the Internet is flooded with information, be it reliable or unreliable, it’s good to know that there is a reliable option for online health care.

The Internet is often a font of useless information. While a great deal of reliable information is available online, more often than not, when looking for health information, people come up empty-handed.

Perhaps an even more dangerous aspect of the Internet is the vast amounts of misleading and false information available online. It is very easy to go on the Internet looking for reliable health information and come away having found no surefire answers.

The telemedicine option now offered by many hospitals will be a breath of fresh air on a somewhat polluted medium. Anyone can go online and get information from a reliable source.

As always, face-to-face appointments are still preferable to getting medical information online, but we live in a society that increasingly wants accurate information at the click of a button.

Going to the doctor should always be the first option, but sometimes people want to get health information from the comfort of their home.

For those who don’t have the time, the money or the desire to meet directly with a physician, the telemedicine option makes sure they are still able to get reliable medical information.

editorialboard: Carrie Tett, Jocelyn Marcus, Katie Goldsmith, Andrea Hauser and Tim Paluch