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Ten seconds.

Ten seconds it takes, to open a laptop, google our painful symptoms, click search, diagnose ourselves, and discover our treatment options – all the information we need, all from the comfort of our own bed, right?

It's no surprise in this 'Internet era' that we turn to social media and Google to be our healthcare advisors, as opposed to searching for the leaflet we picked up from the dental surgery waiting room six months ago. But the real question is – how reliable is what we read online? I am sure everyone can agree, not everything we read online is accurate, and seeking advice from your friends on Facebook isn't the most reliable place for patients and parents to be making appropriate healthcare decisions.

Particularly for young patients, due to their evolving understanding and conditions, formulating an appropriate care plan on their condition may already be a challenge, and the patient and parent should be fully equipped with information when deciding how to deal with this – the disappointing reality is, this isn't always the case. Therefore, this paper's research has the aim of assesing 'the adequacy of patient resources to support understanding of, and decision-making about, hypodontia treatment.'

Dental professionals were asked several questions regarding how they examine, treat and advise patients on hypodontia. Most general dental practitioners (97%) said they give verbal advice, only 7% advise online resources. Specialists, however, generally provided more written information, that is leaflets, than GDPs. Improvements for information regarding hypodontia were also suggested: provision of tailored information, and having more online and interactive sources for patients to access. This implies that the format of current information may be outdated.

Another method used by the authors was searching hypodontia-related terms on three popular search engines, and screening the first 100 hits to identify those that reached the authors' criteria, ie 'information about hypodontia and its treatment; for patients and families; English; >500 words to enable quality assessment'. These were further investigated to assess their quality, relevance and content. This also applied to all eligible written patient information sources, eg patient information leaflets. From the 2,800 websites that were screened – only 13 passed the quality assessment, supporting the consensus that although online information is easily accessible, it may not always be dependable.

The authors conclude that the information currently provided for hypodontia patients is insufficient for patients to obtain enough knowledge on their condition and treatment, hence impairing patients making an informed decision about their care.