This site has won a number of content awards including the Stanford Top Medical Site Award, the USA Today Hot Site Award, Magellan 4 Star Site, a Hot Med Site Award, a Top 5% award, a Medalle d'Or, and a Six Senses Health Care Leading Site Award. Indeed, this is an excellent site that contains links to a large number of health-related links. For example, it has a section called: "Resources you may want to recommend to patients, or friends/parents of patients, diagnosed with:" This section is devoted to sites that may be of interest to physicians' patients. These are disease-specific links such as AIDS/HIV, Allergies, ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease), Alzheimer's Disease, Anxiety Arthritis, Asthma, Birth Control, Breast Cancer, Depression, Diabetes, Elevated Cholesterol, Enlarged Prostate (BPH), Epilepsy, Hair Loss, Heart Conditions, Insomnia, Menopause, etc.

Pages that are not yet available or are currently under construction are indicated by a rising sun while pages that have been updated within seven days are indicated by an exclamation point. For example, clicking on "Insomnia" takes one up a level to the current contents of the "Insomnia" page. This page contains several links; for example, "Facts on Insomnia" takes one to the NIH gopher and flat text files about insomnia. This is pretty heavy reading for most non-physicians/non-scientists. Other links are less useful and include links to a news summary of a journal article that showed the elderly suffering from insomnia are more likely to have automobile accidents. While that may be true, it is a bit of a stretch to think that patients who have insomnia are likely to find such an article of much use.

Clicking on "enlarged prostate (BPH)" was a better yield of information. The subheading entitled "Medical News and Alerts" led to listings of 12 recent medical announcements covering treatments that ranged from medical therapy to surgical therapy, to recent advances in laser treatment. Under the heading of "Discussion Groups" there was a link to further reading that included over ten references on BPH; many were likely available at the local library. Most of the sites included large amounts of readily available information.

Perhaps the biggest advantage of the site is the opportunity to "Stay abreast of developments" in each area. That link allows any reader to register his/her email address and receive updates from The Doctor's Guide about that specific area of interest.

Other links on The Doctor's Guide allowed physicians and patients to read about new drug approvals and warnings.

Also potentially useful was the opportunity to find the home pages of a variety of health care and health professions agencies. For example, for the student or casual reader interested in viewing information about medical schools, there was a link to medical school pages. However, this turned out to be easily the least useful function of the page. Internet medical resources included listings for medical schools, clinics, journals, schools of nursing and pharmacy, etc. While I did not investigate every one, the medical schools listing seemed nearly useless. For example, several of the Web pages were given the heading "School of Medicine." Thus, I did not know what medical school I was linking to until the Web page came up. Being from the University of California in Irvine, I was startled to find that the only UCI page listed was the UCI Health Promotions Center page which is in the department of Social Ecology-not the medical school at all. Indeed, UCI's College of Medicine wasn't even linked. Neither was Vanderbilt University's. Therefore, although the potential for useful information was there, this page was incomplete and poorly designed.

By contrast, the journal listings page was fairly complete. In general, the links were to publishers, and it was possible to view the table of contents for current editions of a wide variety of medical journals. Several could be subscribed to via email.

The clinics and medical centers listing was fairly incomplete and suffered from the same shortcomings as the medical schools page. In all, though, the Doctor's Guide was a clearinghouse of information that could be of use not only to doctors but also to the patients they treat. I would recommend checking it out. This page and several other medical links can be accessed via my home page.

Ed Robinson earned his M.D. and Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and Vanderbilt University Graduate School in Nashville, Tennessee. Dr. Robinson has spent over ten years studying HIV and the immune response to HIV in infected individuals. He is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Pathology at the University of California at Irvine, where he continues his research and teaches undergraduate, graduate, and medical students about HIV and the immune system.