"Dr. Google" is easy to contact, always accessible, available everywhere, has unlimited time and offers expert advice for laypeople. And what is more – those who seek health information online will find sound to very high-quality information on a number of portals with a broad reach, as the Goethe University Frankfurt reported in 2017 for the German-language Ökotest (Ecotest) magazine.
Yet patients nonetheless will occasionally be confronted with false claims in their online research and place their faith in unprofessional websites. "In order to protect patients from being the targets of false information, we need a market watchdog authority to keep an eye on such efforts. So far, relatively few ideas have been introduced and efforts to enforce accountability are lacking. Developing effective strategies to address this problem is a matter of urgency," says Mohn.