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We are drowning today in medical information — and,
by and large, that’s a wonderful thing.
It was only a generation or so
ago that it was considered radical when a bunch of Boston feminists dug out
the kind of information we feel entitled to today
and published the first Our Bodies, Ourselves, a nitty-gritty, user-friendly
medical guide for women.
Now, 62.6 million Americans, 37 percent use the Internet
for medical information. In just a year, from August, 2004 to August, 2005,
visits to medical Web
sites grew a whopping 23 percent, according to ComScore Media Metrix, an
Internet
audience measurement company based in Reston, Virginia.
With such a surfeit,
the challenge these days is to find trustworthy medical information amid
all the profit-driven, misleading, or just plain erroneous
stuff on the Net.
With 350 big medical sites to choose from, and thousands
more lesser sites, zooming in efficiently on reliable information takes some
practice.
On
the other hand, that’s what I do all day.
So here, without further
ado, are my favorite sites — the ones I use
frequently and trust for carefully-vetted, understandable information.
The
government does a wonderful job on medical Web sites. The best
site by far for researching any disease — and the only site you
really need if you’re trying to get the basics in a few hours — is
www.nih.gov, run by the National Institutes of Health. From the
main NIH site, you can get
reasonably detailed information on many diseases, plus links to
other excellent government sites such as www.clinicaltrials.gov,
which
lets you plug in your
diseaseand state and get information on studies you can join.
Other
good government sites for researching diseases and general health
information are www.medlineplus.gov, which is run by the
NIH and the
National Library
of Medicine, www.healthfinder.gov, put together by the department
of Health and
Human Services, and www.cancer.gov, run by the National Cancer
Institute.
And if you’re really a medical junkie, or have
already mastered the basics of your disease and want to read
medical studies, try PubMed, www.pubmed.gov,
a search service from the National Library of Medicine that
provides access to more than 11 million citations in medical journals.
Among
the nongovernmental sites, my favorite is Consumer Reports,
www.consumerreportsmedicalguide.org. Much of the information
here is free, though for some of the specific
material, you have to pay $19 a year or $4.95 per month.
Consumer Reports also compiles
a list of what it deems the 20 best sites on the Web at www.healthratings.org.
The
country’s most popular medical site is WebMD, www.webmd.com, which
also ranks number one for quality on Consumer Reports’ top
20 list. In the interest of full disclosure, I have a contract
with WebMD to publish columns.
That said, I find the site too busy visually. On the other
hand, there’s
a good reason the site is popular — it’s extensive
and quite user-friendly.
Among the sites run by teaching
hospitals, my favorite is the Mayo Clinic’s,
www.mayoclinic.com. It has clear information on many diseases
and carries the two seals of approval you should look for
on any medical Web site, one from
Health on the Net, www.healthonnet.org, and the other from
URAC, www.urac.org. Both of these independent, non-profit
organizations use specific criteria to
vet information on health Web sites.
Many medical schools
also have Web sites, though some of these are better at
promoting their own doctors or research
than
giving general
medical
information. One good one is Harvard’s. Go to www.hms.harvard.edu and then click on “consumer
information,” then “intelihealth.” The
site is owned by Aetna, Inc. but Harvard Medical School
has editorial responsibility. The site has
encyclopedic health information, as well as reviews of
breaking medical news stories, an “ask-the-expert” feature
that answers selected e-mailed questions and a number of
interactive tools.
If it’s drug information you’re
looking for, skip the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s
site, because it’s not very helpful,
and instead go to www.PDRHealth.com. This site gives consumer-friendly
information based on FDA-approved information taken from
the Physicians’ Desk Reference,
the doctors’ bible of drug information. Or try www.safemedication.com,
run by the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists.
For
comparisons of cost, safety, and effectiveness of some
commonly prescribed drugs, check out Consumer Reports’ relatively
new offering, Best Buy Drugs, www.crbestbuydrugs.org.
Three
final thoughts:
Steer clear of sites that promote a particular product,
treatment, or doctor.
Check out your health plan on the Web. Some offer medical
as well as insurance information.
And visit — with caution — the patient advocacy
groups for whatever disease you’re interested in. Some
of the information may be biased, but visiting these sites
may at least suggest questions to ask your doctors
about new treatments. Many patient advocacy sites also
guide you to support groups.
Bottom line? It can be a jungle
out there in medical cyberspace.
But if you stick to the reputable sites, you can quickly
become a very
savvy patient. — Judy
Foreman |
