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Health care professionals and patients alike should view with equal parts delight and concern the exponential growth of the Internet (the Net), and especially its graphical, userfriendly subset, the World Wide Web (the Web), as a medical information delivery tool (Lundberg, 1995; Kassirer, 1995). Delight because the Internet hosts a large number of high-quality medical resources and poses seemingly endless opportunities to inform, teach, and connect professionals and patients alike. Concern because the fulfillment of that promise remains discouragingly distant. Technical glitches aside, when it comes to medical information, the Internet too often resembles a cocktail conversation rather than a tool for effective health care communication and decision making.
The problem is not too little information but too much, vast chunks of it incomplete, misleading, or inaccurate, and not only in the medical arena (Achenbach, 1996; Consumer Reports, 1997). The Net-and especially the Web-has the potential to become the world's largest vanity press. It is a medium in which anyone with a computer can serve simultaneously as author, editor, and publisher and can fill any or all of these roles anonymously if he or she so chooses. In such an environment, novices and savvy Internet users alike can have trouble distinguishing the wheat from the chaff, the useful from the harmful.
This should not be terribly surprising. After all, the Internet is a new and exciting communications medium and, therefore, highly attractive to those whose agendas range from the sublime to the ridiculous (Lundberg, 1989). At first glance, science and snake oil may not always look all that different on the Net. Those seeking to promote informed, intelligent discussion often sit byte by byte with those whose sole purpose is to advance a political point of view or make a fast buck. And naive viewers may be lulled by technological brilliance into placing more value on the content than it deserves, simply because they get it from the Net.
In fact, effective use of technology can be an important indicator of quality-and especially utility-in communicating medical information on the Net. The best digital destinations will employ designs and tools that facilitate navigation through large quantities of information, provide appropriate mechanisms for feedback and interactivity, monitor and maintain the links they've chosen to provide to other...