Medicine
This monthly column will review Web sites and elements of the World Wide Web that deal with health and science. Each month, one general area of medicine will be evaluated and several Web sites relevant to the topic will be reviewed. The reviews will target a wide audience and each topic will be reviewed with that audience in mind. Therefore, the Web sites will first be evaluated with scientists, health care practitioners, medical students, and medical residents in mind. Each topic will next be evaluated and reviewed with the general public in mind.
An excellent example of a site that has topics relevant to both the public and the professional sectors is the OncoLink site discussed briefly below. Reviews will cover both traditional and alternative medical topics and fields. As a monthly column, several future topics have already been selected for evaluation. This month, an overview of several Web sites, their addresses and a one- or-two-sentence description of each is given. Subsequent topics to be discussed include women's health, human sexuality and sexually transmitted diseases, cancer, AIDS, preventive medicine, pediatrics, exercise and diet, holistic medicine and chiropractors, and the principal scientific Web site, the National Institutes of Health gopher. The health home page lists well over thirty separate, general topic headings relevant to medicine and health. An overview of a few of these sites, along with the current listed number of Web sites for each, are: Anatomy (8); Cancer (42); Cardiology (10); Chiropractic (2); Communicable Disease (1); Health Education (7); Environmental Medicine (1); Epidemiology (2); Family Medicine (5); Home Test Kits for cancer and other diseases (1); Hospitals (28); Immunology (4); Institutes of Medicine (16); Medical Schools (75); Internal Medicine (3); Microbiology and Virology (18); Health News (5); and Obstetrics and Gynecology (6). There are also listings for the World Health Net. Many of these topics will be addressed in future issues.
There are a number of Web sites that can be useful to physicians, medical educators, medical residents and medical students. The Health Home Page contains an overview of these, listed by medical subspecialty. An example of one such subspecialty, Pathology, has a home page
This site includes direct access to over 15 pathology image banks containing easily over 100 medical images of various pathology specimens. At least one of these, the Urbana Image Bank, downloads GIF images in a ProView image program. This program allows the end-user to zoom in, alter colors, and cut regions of the slide that are of interest. The Urbana Image home page
Other sites include image sites at University of Washington, University of Nottingham, University of Rochester, and University of Pittsburgh. All of these sites have pathology images that can be directly downloaded to the end-user. They are useful to physicians and medical students. The image quality is less useful than photographic images in textbooks, but should be a good adjunct learning tool. An additional site of interest is the Robert Wood Johnson Image list. This is a series of patient clinical cases that includes one-line descriptions of patients' problems. There are then a series of medical images, stored as GIF files, associated with these cases. At the time this column was written, there were two cases for each of the following: skin and connective diseases, breast pathology, gastrointestinal pathology, genitourinary pathology, and blood diseases, along with several miscellaneous cases and two "cases of the week." It seems likely that at least the "cases of the week" are updated weekly but it is unclear how often the other cases are changed.
An example of a particular data base that might be of interest to both health care providers and the general public are the AIDS Web sites. AIDS, or the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, is a global health concern. Over 20,000,000 persons worldwide are believed to be infected by the human immunodeficiency virus or HIV, the causative agent in AIDS. Since it is a global disease, there are global Web sites including those in Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Australia, and, of course, the United States. The AIDS home page lists over 40 separate World Wide Web servers. The most useful of these for scientists is the Los Alamos Sequence Data Base. There are also numerous servers for physicians, patients, and the interested public.
For HIV-infected individuals and the interested public, the AIDS Treatment Network Directory is an excellent source of information on therapies. This Web site has one-page descriptions of various anti-HIV drugs currently being evaluated in clinical trials. It also discusses several alternative medical treatments such as acupuncture in AIDS.
In regard to more general health care concerns, see Alternative medicines.
This home page allows access to a number of different alternative medicine sources including acupuncture, chiropractors, medicinal herbs, and other homeopathic medicine sources. As an example of one such source, the medicinal herb section is evaluated further. This is only a sample of the multiple sites and information sources listed under the alternative medicine heading.
The Herbal Hall listing includes a number of servers specializing in "traditional" medical approaches to disease. There is a listing for the Australian Botanical Garden as well as the University of Washington Herb Garden; the latter will be evaluated below. In addition, there are short news reports of interest to medicinal herbalists as well as book reviews.
For those interested in medicinal herbs for homeopathic treatment, the following contains a partial listing of the University of Washington Herb Garden. Included is a map of the Herbal Garden, a list of the plants by both common and botanical name, as well as fairly low-resolution photographs of the plants.
There are at least a couple of holistic medicine, exercise/diet magazines in electronic form on the Web; these include Balance magazine and the Good Earth Medicine.
The former of these contains a heavy load of exercise tips from non-physicians and, apparently, non-scientists. The articles are general in nature, simplistic, but overall don't seem to make any obvious and dangerous mistakes in their recommendations. The latter is dedicated to holistic medicine and includes information about aging and general health.
Finally, an example of a really great health-related Web site is the University of Pennsylvania's OncoLink.
There are also several publications from the Palo Alto Medical Foundation and other medical groups. These Web sites have questions and answers from health care professionals about general and specific diseases as well as ideas about how to improve your general health. Many are funded by individual health insurance companies or hospitals and, to some degree, act as paid advertisements.
As mentioned in the opening paragraphs of this column, the chief source of information for scientists is the National Institutes of Health gopher. What if, however, you just want to know where your tax dollars are going regarding research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation? The division of Grants Data Base includes that information.
This database includes search capabilities for all AIDS-related research as well as the ability to search for funding according to individual university or state. In addition, if one wants to find information about an individual grant, the Freedom of Information Act allows anyone to read the abstract of any funded grant by searching according to the above criteria and highlighting a particular grant. The National Science Foundation has a similar listing.
However, the NSF database is less user-friendly and requires the user to search by specific keywords.
The World Wide Web as accessed through Netscape or Mosaic and searched through "Yahoo" is an excellent source of information about a myriad of health and science related topics. This first column is meant to be an introduction to the breadth of topics to be covered in the future in far greater detail. Next month's column will evaluate Web sites under the general heading of Cancer.