Trust me; trust me not

Has the availability of electronic resources made the lives of medical students a bit easier? It would seem so, thanks to the proliferation of broadband connections and of websites filled with biomedical information. No surprise then that the answers to many students' questions can seem tantalisingly accessible. It is a rarity-at least in the developed world-for a medical student not to have looked up something on Google, or more recently, Wikipedia, for a diagnosis or other pathophysiological information. And the BMJ gave additional reasons to do so: a recent paper suggested that Google might be a useful tool in helping to diagnose “conditions with unique symptoms and signs that can easily be used as search terms”(BMJ 2006;333:1143-5, doi: 10.1136/bmj.39003.640567.AE

However, with ease of access to online compendiums come complicated questions about how well medical professionals search and sort such material. The Google article prompted a flurry of responses to the BMJ, many of which pointed out that to get the best evidence from a search algorithm like Google's, or even from the medical database Medline, much experience and discernment are necessary. As Dean Giustini, medical librarian at the University of British Columbia, points out, “The information that you find there may have integrity, and may have …