In between phone calls on practical issues, I worked on my paper concerning

the reliability of medical information on the Web. As a little experiment,

I tried searching for "mononucleosis" on Google. (MEDLINEplus,

the ambitious federal portal, notes that "mononucleosis" is

one of the most common search terms on its site. Since the disease is

not serious but lacks a cure, some reasonable patients and parents may

want to diagnose it and treat the symptoms on their own.)

I noticed a few things:

• First, MEDLINEplus does not appear very prominently among the search

  results. Sites with much less funding and institutional support, and

  with much less detailed information, are at least as prominent on the

  Web. Indeed, a Hungarian student who once had mononucleosis and has

  written 700 words on the subject is almost as prominent as MEDLINEplus,

  which is a major product of a federal agency with a $250 million annual

  budget.

• Second, it is difficult to make an accurate diagnosis of mononucleosis

  using the Internet, because its symptoms vary and resemble the symptoms

  of other diseases (including HIV/AIDS). There is a fairly reliable blood

  test that only a physician can conduct. Therefore, many people who suspect

  that they have mononucleosis will learn from the Web that they may be

  right, but their diagnosis must be confirmed by a physician. The value

  of using the Internet in this case is somewhat limited.

• Third, you are more likely to find yourself using MEDLINEplus if you

  know that you are interested in "mononucleosis" (a scientific

  term), rather than if you only know that you have fever, headache, swollen

  glands, tiredness, and malaise (the main symptoms of the disease). If

  you look for symptoms, most of the sites you find with Google will be

  irrelevant or unreliable.

• Fourth, the apparent reliability of prominent sites that describe

  mononucleosis differ widely, but the main information that they offer

  is similar (with the exception of the material on homeopathy that appears

  in some of the non-governmental sites.) Even the 700-word site constructed

  by a Hungarian student offers fundamentally the same message as MEDLINEplus—on

  this particular topic.