When I feared my daughter might have hand, foot and mouth disease, I did what any modern-day parent would do.

I Googled it.

From MayoClinic.com,I quickly learned that this very common childhood illness is highly contagious, and so, it was likely she caught it from another tot in her playgroup.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention informed me that it’s not the same disease as the one among farmyard animals, known as foot-and-mouth disease, which quickly answered a concern among some mommies in our playgroup. No, there was no way she caught it from the goats and sheep at the petting zoo.

I cringed at the thought that my own daughter was now part of a horrible viral chain reaction – she caught the virus from her friend... who would she pass it to next? Fortunately, I found relief: on the Internet. I read that after a week, the red bumps on her bottom, feet, hands and tongue would disappear, and she would be back to her toddling self.

Searching on the Internet also is like a chain reaction – a series of events in which each event is the result of the one preceding and the cause of the one following.

Find a search engine. Enter a search term. At the touch of a button, thousands of links to different Web sites appear. Click. Click. Click. Each Web site leads us to another and to another. Before we know it, we’ve found and read so much information online that we are like experts in our own right.

Why do we turn to this World Wide Web for answers to our most pressing health concerns? Moreover, how do we know that the health and medical information we find online is true?

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