Is cybermedicine killing you? The story of a Cochrane disaster

This editorial briefly reviews the series of events that led to the publication, dissemination and eventual retraction of a flawed Cochrane systematic review on interactive health communication applications (IHCAs), which was widely reported in the media with headlines such as 'Internet Makes Us Sick', 'Knowledge May Be Hazardous to Web Consumers' Health', 'Too Much Advice Can Be Bad for Your Health', 'Click to Get Sick?' and even 'Is Cybermedicine Killing You?'. The authors show that while the media attention helped to speed up the identification of errors, leading to a retraction of the review after only 13 days, a paper subsequently published by Rada shows that the retraction, in contrast to the original review, remained largely unnoticed by the public. The authors examine the three flaws of the review and then discuss 'retraction ethics' for researchers, editors/publishers and journalists, making recommendations for the future