Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right: Harm Aggravated by Inaccurate Information on the Internet

Abstract

There has been much concern expressed in the literature about the use of medical information on the Internet by patients and families. Although much work has been done to quantify the misinformation available on the Internet, there have not been reports of actual harm to children resulting from this misinformation. We present the case of a 1-year-old boy whose clinical course of diarrhea was complicated not only by inaccurate advice given by the emergency room physician, but also by the same advice received from the Internet.