Medical information and the Internet: do you know what you are getting?

Due to the Internet technology, hundreds of Web sites are accessible for medical information, and the retrieval of such information is quite rapid. Once you as a consumer obtain all of this information, how do you determine whether the information you are looking at is valid and current and even relevant to your needs? This article presents various criteria necessary to evaluate the information on a medical Web site; no standards currently are in place to mandate the validity of information published on the Internet.