ABSTRACT. Objective. The purpose of this study was to assess the quality of information a lay person could obtain from Internet (Net) sources regarding the treatment of childhood diarrhea. It also afforded an opportunity to evaluate the awareness and compliance of the general medical community with the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) guidelines on the management of acute diarrhea.Methods. This was a prospective, open, observational, literature review performed with a computer workstation and medical library. The AAP practice parameter on the management of acute gastroenteritis in young children was selected as the current standard by which to judge all other documents. The Net was searched, and all documents retrievable from the first 300 references were evaluated for compliance with current recommendations on the management of diarrhea in children.Results. T he public wants access to information on medical problems. The suppliers of information on the Internet (Net) have responded to this desire, and medical information is abundant. The question is whether the information is up to date and accurate. We have had a number of parents cite information about their child's condition, which they have obtained from the World Wide Web (WEB). The parents perceive this information as cutting edge and present it to the physician for review and comment with the implicit hope that the information they have retrieved will help their child. The quality of the references presented to us by the parents has seemed quite variable.We decided to do a prospective evaluation of a condition having considerable information on which to base current practice standards and for which a good recent practice parameter exists. We selected the treatment of acute diarrhea in childhood. This topic afforded us an opportunity to evaluate how well the information in the recent American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) position paper 1 on diarrhea is being disseminated to the lay public. MATERIAL AND METHODSNetscape, Infoseek, and Yahoo were used to conduct the Net searches. To duplicate what a lay parent might find, two broad searches were performed. We first used the key words diarrhea ϩ treatment. This produced in Ͼ16 000 matches, and we collected addresses for the first 200. For the second search, the word child was added to the key word list for the search. Again, Ͼ15 000 matches were reported. The first 100 addresses for this search were collected and added to the first search. The second search yielded considerable overlap in references from the first search, and only four new sources were found that had not been identified previously. The number 300 for references was selected on the assumption that was a larger search than most casual browsers would evaluate. Because Infoseek is a random search, 300 references should provide a very representative selection. Other search engines such as Yahoo attempt to rank the requested references in a probable order of relevance to the search request. It is interesting, however, that a cross-check using Ya...

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