The Internet: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Three articles, a perspective, an original research study, and a case-report, highlight how the Internet, more specifically Google, is changing our lives and those of our patients. The Internet has been widely available for about a decade, Google, as noted in the perspective by Ian Wacogne and Robert Scott-Jupp, has joined an exclusive club of English words which can correctly be used as a verb. Paul Scullard and colleagues from Nottingham assessed the accuracy of medical advice from various websites using the Google search engine. As reported previously in other studies, and not surprisingly, much of the information on the web is inaccurate although some websites are consistently better than others. The case report is most intriguing, highlighting how parents of two different children used the Internet to correctly diagnose their children with lysosomal storage disorders. Perhaps the Internet should be thought of as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, a well-known spaghetti western directed by Sergio Leone in 1966, starring Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli …