Director of the Garfield Library in Brunswick, New York, and author of A Practical Guide to Internet Filters (Neal-Schuman, 1997)
kgs@bluehighways.com
Column for November 1998
The question is not whether there is good medical information on the Internet, but how to winnow it from the vast acres of chaff blowing across the digital prairies.
One place for librarians to start is an online report called Comparison of Health Information Megasites. Based on a project led by Pat Anderson of the University of Michigan Dental Library, the site evaluates 25 megasites and mentions more than 50. For a sneaky librarian trick, Mary Walsh, Internet and reference librarian at the University of Colorado/Denver, uses Instructions to Authors in the Health Sciences "as a back door for finding the Web presence of specific journals." Finally, Medical Matrix offers 14 different, freely searchable versions of Medline.
To build your reference skills, consider a distance-learning course such as the one taught periodically by Diane Kovacs and Isabel Danforth. Diane is also coauthoring a book on medical resources on the Internet, due out from Library Solutions Press later this year.
Patrons need a bit more help with locating information than your average librarian. A popular approach to taming the infomonster is to build a Web resource with links to high-quality, locally relevant medical information. Lynn Oliver of the Morris County (N.J.) Library has a typical launchpad; this small but useful Web site presents resources based on the types of questions patrons actually ask—basic disease information, travel health, how to find out if a doctor is certified, locating a hospital, and even Quackwatch, "a nonprofit corporation whose purpose is to combat health-related frauds, myths, fads, and fallacies." A nice local touch: Oliver's site weaves in links to the New Jersey Union List of Serials plus references to useful books.
With or without a local Web page, helping patrons locate information about diseases has never been easier or more satisfying, and success stories abound.
"One of our most memorable success stories concerned a mother whose son had just been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome," related Sharon Campbell of the Rochester Hills (Mich.) Public Library. "We were only able to find one line in a medical dictionary, but a great amount of excellent information on the Internet, which included ways to contact support groups."
For Web sites providing information about specific diseases, I have to thank Barbara Grimes, librarian at Masonic Medical Research Laboratory in Utica, New York, for pointing me to Diseases, Disorders, and Related Topics, maintained by Tor Ahlenius, a systems person at the library of Sweden's Karolinska Institutet. This may be the best single medical resource on the Net. I tried it with a variety of examples of real patron questions, from Asperger's Syndrome to uterine fibroids, and each time I got numerous high-quality hits that ran the gamut from popular articles to highly academic treatises.
Grimes also recommended Healthfinder, a government site with a friendly front end. Healthfinder didn't do quite as well on disease-specific search terms as Karolinska, but it still had a lot of good information; for example, if you knew Asperger's Syndrome was a type of autism, you could retrieve excellent resources. Healthfinder's friendly front end is also a major plus.
Another good tool for diseases is Medscape, which claims to have "the Web's largest collection of free, full-text, peer-reviewed clinical medicine articles." You have to register, but it's free, and Medscape now offers a "specialty home page" feature that customizes the site toward your interests when you log in.
Then there's Yahoo Health, which is predictably broad and not selective, but a good place to mine for diseases or browse for personal life stories about illness. We librarians are sensitive to the quality of information, but such informal sites can be useful for people sharing the same disease and can yield a special perspective on diagnosis and treatment. Once, while researching multiple sclerosis for a patron, I discovered a chatgroup for people with MS; after lurking for a couple of days I had a different picture of the drug Betaserone than what was provided either by government or commercial Web sites. If you're debating whether to block chat at Internet workstations, keep in mind that many if not most diseases have associated chatgroups.
You may want to help patrons learn how to assess the resources linked to by the megasites. An example of a good disease-specific source maintained by a nonmedical person is the Ovarian Cancer Resource Notebook, recommended by Carl R. Sandstedt of the St. Charles City-County Library in St. Peters, Missouri. You could also encourage patrons to look for the logo of the Health on the Net Foundation, which has an honor code for medical and health Web sites.
Drug questions are common in libraries. Librarians' Index to the Internet to the rescue: This LSTA-funded site has a 27-category health section with a section called "Drugs" that lists close to a dozen comprehensive pharmaceutical sites, including RxList and the Pharmaceutical Information Network.
Finally, after several days spent reading about end-stage cancer, aging, and useless drugs, it was a relief to find RxLaughs. It just might be the best medicine!