Obtaining good quality medical information from the World Wide Web

Despite the complexity of the Internet, it is surprisingly easy to search the World Wide Web for medical information. With the right skills you can save yourself a lot of time and effort making the Internet a highly effective tool for supporting your work in health and medicine. Internet offers great opportunities for interactive learning and can help you to plan lectures and create teaching materials. Moreover, physicians can find many Web resources that can assist with articles and assignments and support academic research. Evidence-based indications about medical treatments are also available. However, Internet users need to be aware of the dangers of misleading and inaccurate medical information. In this article, we intend to illustrate to physicians the pros and cons of the World Wide Web, how to apply basic critical appraisal techniques to gather good quality medical information, and a number of useful medical Web sites.