The first and perhaps most difficult challenge for consumers is to make sense out of the health information explosion. Many popular magazines regularly print health articles, newspapers often devote entire sections to medicine, the publications of health newsletters abound, television programs feature numerous health stories, and a plethora of scientific health-related studies are published daily. There are an estimated 20,000 scientific, technical, and medical articles published each year worldwide and this does not include the larger number of nontechnical articles. Interest in health information appears to have reached an all-time high.

The availability of so much health information has drawbacks; the major drawback is that so much of the information is confusing, sometimes even contradictory . Even medical experts have trouble separating fact from fiction. It is not unusual to see some new finding headlined one day and completely refuted the next. It has been speculated that as much as 50% of the medical advice we follow today will be considered obsolete, or at least will undergo major modification, during the next 5 years. For some people the ubiquity of refutations and contradictions leads to an attitude sometimes referred to as health fatalism, which maintains that nothing can be believed. People with a fatalistic view disregard health information because they believe that new findings will inevitably disagree with facts previously accepted as true.