Managing the business side of medical practise is not something many doctors are good at. Physician’s Practice Digest, at http://www.ppdnet.com , an online magazine for physicians, features general-interest articles on topics such as medical office managament. While the scope of www.ppdnet.com is fairly limited, and very US-centric, the site is worth a visit if you are looking for articles about the non-clinical aspects of medicine, including office management, savings and retirement planning, legal issues and dealing with insurers. If you find it hard to cope with the daily stress of being a doctor, Life in Practise offers useful links to help prevent burnout !

PATIENT EDUCATION

RxMed at http://www.rxmed.com provides an excellent collection of handouts for patients which you can use for educating patients. These fact sheets, which cover more than 400 medical conditions ranging from acne to morning sickness to drug addiction, provide easy-to-read, concise information on each conditions symptoms and causes, risk factors and prevention, activity or diet restrictions, and, for more serious illnesses, complications and prognoses. Many other sites also offer an excellent and comprehensive collection of patient educational materials, including http://www.betterhealth.com/healthwise , http://www.48hours.net and the Ohio State University at http://www.osu.edu/units/osuhosp/disclaim2.htm provides over 1,400 Ohio State University Medical Center Patient Education materials which have been produced for patient education.

MEDICAL JOURNALS

Many physicians naively expect to be able to find all the articles from all medical journals on the Web for free. The sad reality is that while most medical journals have their own websites, very few offer free access to all their content. This is because they still need to sell print subscriptions in order to survive ! A refreshing exception is the British Medical Journal, at www.bmj.com, which has put up back issues as well as the full-text of current issues on its website. It’s a pleasure to go through the BMJ – and a major plus point is that because it is in electronic format, it’s possible to search through all the archives, to find any article you are looking for ! You can also submit articles to the BMJ, as well as letters to the Editor , online through email. Customised @lerts is an additional useful service which emails you when eBMJ has new content that might interest you. In order to make browsing fun, the site also offers a section called Collected Resources which puts together a collections of BMJ articles by specialty and topic.

Also, many journals offer free access on a trial basis when their website is relatively new. A good address for such cases is HighWirePress at http://highwire.stanford.edu/, who have put a number of well-known journals online with temporary unrestricted access to journal articles. The journals which offer free trials are higlighted.

WebMedLit, at www.webmedlit.com is an easy way to get access to the latest medical journal articles. WebMedLit presents the articles from 22 leading medical journals in a streamlined consistent format. It includes the leading medical journals, such as the JAMA, NEJM and the BMJ.

What about Indian medical journals ? The best so far is the Bombay Hospital Journal, which has put up the full-text of all its articles, as well as back issues, at http://www.bhj.org/. Indian Pediatrics is also online at http://www.indianpediatrics.org/. You can find a list of Indian medical journals on the Web at http://www.qmedin.com/medsites/indianwebjournals.htm.

For prospective authors, who would like to send their articles to leading medical journals for publications, a very valuable resource , Instructions to Authors in the Health Sciences offers links to Web sites which provide instructions to authors for over 3,000 journals in the health sciences.