So, where does one start ? Actually, this depends upon your goal. If you are looking for a specific bit of information ( for example, treatment options for hypertensive encephalopathy, then you need to start by using a search engine. Search engines basically are an index of the web - they are designed to catalogue all the webpages out there, so that you can find the specific one you are looking for. Obviously, this is a tall order, given the ever-increasing size of the web, and few search engines can cope with the glut of information. This is why there are now medical search engines which have been develeoped to help doctors ( and patients) find medical information. However, these are often not as comprehensive or complete as the traditional general-purpose search engines, and it’s often a good idea to use two or more of these search engines.

A good example of a general search engine is www.altavista.com. This is very powerful - and the major problem with it is that a simple query can return tens of thousands of hits - and it’s physically impossible ( and very stressful !) to wade through all the hits. This is with you need to learn strategies for advanced searching which allow you to retrieve only relevant sites, using Boolean logic.

Other powerful general purpose search engines include: www.hotbot.com , www.northernlight.com and www.google.com.

Specialised medical search engines help to keep you in heathcare territory, so you don’t get lost in reams of irrelevant information. Medscout at www.medscout.com is an interesting medical search engine which allows you to search for specific information; as well as to browse various sites according to categories, such as Ethics, Guidelines, Diseases, Death, Humour and Hospitals, so that it’s a useful springboard into medical sites on the Net.

Science.komm at www.sciencekomm.at connects you to bioscience journals, medical journals, and science publishers; helps you find the best websites for science and medical news ; and also provides information on how to access full-text articles online and locate medical and bioscience dictionaries, link directories and newsgroups and e-mail lists. This site has done a lot of spade work to make it easier for the doctor to mine for valuable nuggets of useful information, since the digging and sorting through the tons of dirt has already been done for you by the site editors.

Other medical search engines include: Achoo at www.achoo.com, and HealthAtoZ at www.healthatoz.com, and Medexplorer at www.medexplorer.com,

What about the times when you just want to browse ? At these times, entering the Net through a medical gateway or "portal" is more sensible.

One of the best is Medical Matrix, at www.medmatrix.org. Describing itself as "ranked, peer-reviewed, annotated, updated, clinical medicine resources," Medical Matrix includes links to News, Full Text / MultiMedia, Abstracts, Textbooks, Major Websites, Practice Guidelines, Cases , Images, CME, Patient Education, Directories, Educational Materials and Forums, all classified according to medical specialty. Each site is reviewed by practicing clinicians and rated on a scale of 1-5*****.as well, so that you can go the best 4-star sites, rather than wade through hundreds of poor quality pages. Medical Matrix has done your groundwork for you , and it’s and very well-organized and very comprehensive. It also offers an excellent option for clinical searches, which allows you to search multiple databases through a single form.

Other useful web guides for doctors include:

WebDoctor - The Internet Navigator for Physicians , at http://www.gretmar.com/webdoctor/home.html is a comprehensive index of Internet medical resources which include links to websites, books, articles, journals, CME , databases, patient information and mailing lists arranged by subject area - both by diseases and by specialty, with a short review of each.

Yahoo at http://dir.yahoo.com/Health/Medicine/ is the most famous directory for the Internet , and has an excellent collection for medicine as well . However, remember that these are hand-picked sites, and the listing is not complete or comprehensive – and it’s not ranked or rated either.

Medical librarians have played a sterling role in helping physicians find their way through the internet maze. MEDLINEPLUS at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus, run by the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, USA, is a virtual encyclopedia of research, journal articles, databases and health organizations. Though primarily designed for patients, MEDLINEPLUS can connect physicians to just about any major source on clinical trials and laboratory research.

Martindale’s Health Science Guide - 1999 at http://www-sci.lib.uci.edu/HSG/Medical.html is a "Multimedia Specialized Information Resource" currently containing 56,000 teaching files; over 126,300 Medical Cases; 1,068 Multimedia Courses/Textbooks; 1,475 Multimedia Tutorials; over 3,550 Databases, and over 10,400 Movies. This "VIRTUAL" - MEDICAL CENTERis classified and there is also a Nursing, Nutrition, Pharmacy, Veterinary and Public Health Center !

HealthWeb at http://healthweb.org/index.html provides links to specific, evaluated information resources on the World-Wide Web selected by librarians .

Diseases, Disorders and Related Topics at http://www.mic.ki.se//Diseases/ presents a "MeSH Classified" Resources on Internet guide for health care professionals and researchers.

MedFinder at http://www.netmedicine.com/medfinder.htm has been advertised as the web’s medical librarian and is a good front end to many sites. Other starting points designed for doctors are The Doctor’s Guide to the Internet at http://www.docguide.com/ and

The Doctor’s Page - The Website for Practising Physicians at http://www.DoctorsPage.net calls itself the on-call Internet information consultant for doctors. However, the content on this site is still very skimpy.

MedMark, at www.medmark.org, offers an enormous set of bookmarks for most specialties . The site is exhaustive - and exhausting as well, because it simply and uncritically compiles the links - it does not annotate or review them, so you don’t have a clue where each link leads.

MedNets, a search-engine supersite, at www.internets.com/mednets/index.html: The site focuses on providing good medical search engines, including its own Copernic, which is designed to provide the same "searchability" found in 20 medical search engines.

Health on the Net Foundation at www.hon.ch is a non-profit organisation, in Geneva, Switzerland.whose mission is to build and support the international health and medical community on the Internet so that the potential benefits of this new communications medium may be realised by individuals, medical professionals and healthcare providers. It offers a medical search engine called MedHunt at http://www.hon.ch/Library/Theme/Topics/search_assistant.html. The results of this search are very detailed, because not only are they annotated and reveiwed, they also provide information about when the site was visited , and how many links it has. This is very useful, because sites which are updated regularly are active and more valuable than older sites , which often end up providing unreliable information or "dead" links ( which do not work), since the internet changes so rapidly.


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