The quality of health information on the internet

This week's theme issue attempts to provide a framework for thinking about the quality of health information on the internet—a source of anxiety almost since its first appearance. Five years ago Impicciatore and colleagues reviewed website advice on managing fever in children and concluded that it varied widely in terms of accuracy, completeness, and consistency.1 Pick any medical problem today, and the chances are you'll find the same. With at least 80 studies reporting similar findings (G Eysenbach, personal communication), we need no more convincing that the quality of information on the web varies as widely as it does in other media. In 1997 Gagliardi and Jadad identified 47 instruments for measuring healthcare quality on the internet. Four years later, they found another 51—all of them unvalidated (p 569).2 Generating yet more unproved instruments looks like another activity that researchers could usefully stop. However, the proliferation of tools for assessing quality continues unabated, fuelled by anxieties about patient harm. As our international roundup shows (pp 566-7), countries now seem poised to get in on the act, although little beyond urban myths exists to justify the level of their concerns. …