General Medicine Sites

CAM on PubMed
This is a direct link to the NLM’s Pub Med subset of Complementary Medicine Literature. This database allows users to limit their searches only to Complementary Medicine resources and by pass the need to search the entire PubMed system. Don’t forget to look at Pubmed Central on the library’s links for a list of the full text journals available free.

CancerNet
The U.S. National Cancer Institute’s web site. You’ll find a wide range of accurate, credible cancer information here, including peer-reviewed statements on many different types of cancers for patients and detailed treatment statements for health care professionals, covering state-of-the-art care. You’ll also find cancer fact sheets and other publications. All information is updated regularly, has been reviewed by oncology experts and is based on the results of current research.

CANHELP, Inc.
a cancer treatment information and referral service, founded in 1983 by the late Patrick McGrady, encourages cancer patients to have hope and to look at all their treatment options! Over the past 20 years, CANHELP has helped thousands of patients worldwide. The service includes interpretations and opinions from a board of medical consultants. Be sure to look at the Cancer Patient’s Bill of Rights authored by the director of CANHELP, medical writer and journalist Patrick M. McGrady, Jr.

CenterWatch Clinical Trials Listing Service
An international listing of clinical research trials. Search for clinical trials, find out information about physicians and medical centers performing clinical research, and learn about drug therapies newly approved by the Food and Drug Administration. This site is run by CenterWatch, a publishing company that focuses on the clinical trials industry. CenterWatch is neither promoting this research nor involved in conducting any of these trials.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is recognized as the lead federal agency for protecting the health and safety of people – at home and abroad, providing credible information to enhance health decisions, and promoting health through strong partnerships. CDC serves as the national focus for developing and applying disease prevention and control, environmental health, and health promotion and education activities designed to improve the health of the people of the United States .

Clinical Trials
ClinicalTrials.gov offers up-to-date information for locating federally and privately supported clinical trials for a wide range of diseases and conditions. A clinical trial (also clinical research) is a research study in human volunteers to answer specific health questions. Interventional trials determine whether experimental treatments or new ways of using known therapies are safe and effective under controlled environments. Observational trials address health issues in large groups of people of populations in natural settings. ClinicalTrials.gov currently contains approximately 9,700 clinical studies sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, other federal agencies, and private industry. Studies listed in the database are conducted primarily in all 50 States and in over 90 countries.

Consumer Product Safety Commission Home Page
The Consumer Product Safety Commission, an independent U.S. Federal regulatory agency, works to reduce the risks of injury or death from consumer products by issuing and maintaining safety standards, educating the public, issuing recalls for dangerous products, and performing research.

DIRLINE
Directory of Health Organizations.

FreeBooks4Doctors.com
Links to medical books that provide free full text access.

Health Central
This is a comprehensive consumer health site with information on topics from A-Z, discussion centers, and the online advice of Dr. Dean Edell. Other features include personalized health profiles and advice about finding and using health information from an online librarian, Rochelle Perrine Schmalz, the founding medical librarian of the first Planetree Health Resource Center , which opened in 1981.

healthfinder™
The online consumer health information web site produced by the Federal government’s Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. The site offers user-friendly access to its original material (basic information such as fact sheets and frequently-asked-questions on top health concerns), and hyperlinks to Federal, state, local, university and nonprofit consumer health resources, links to online documents, discussion groups, electronic mail lists, and federally sponsored databases.

HealthWeb
Provides links to specific, evaluated information resources on the World-Wide Web selected by librarians and information professionals at leading academic medical centers in the Midwest . Their selection policy emphasizes quality information aimed at assisting health care professionals as well as consumers in solving their information problems.

Health World
HealthWorld Online is your 24-hour health resource center–a virtual health village where you can access information, products, and services to help create your wellness-based lifestyle.

HealthWWWeb
Formerly the Natural Medicine, Complementary Health Care and Alternative Therapies web site. Healthwwweb posts events, alternative medicine links, professional resources (including discussion groups) and a gateway to the fee-based IBIS and AltHealthWatch databases.

HIV/AIDS Resources
Includes AIDSinfo and Spanish-language materials, provided by NLM’s Specialized Information

LOCATORPLUS
Books, journals and audiovisuals in the NLM collections

MEDLINEplus
From the U.S. National Library of Medicine – this one-stop site contains many links to information published by government agencies about different health conditions and links to organizations, directories, dictionaries, and clearinghouses. MEDLINEplus also provides access to

Medscape
This site contains feature articles for health care professionals, patients, and families; and links to related clinical information. Access is free, but a one-time registration is required. They offer free Medline access and some access to full text journals. Updated weekly; email notification of updates is also available.

National Health Information Center
Provides the Health Information Resource Database listing over 1000 organizations and government offices that provide health information upon request. This site also contains synopses from the annual Partnership for Networked Consumer Health Information conference — great to review for new health information delivery projects.

NLM Gateway
The NLM Gateway is a Web-based system that lets users search simultaneously in multiple retrieval systems at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM). It allows users of NLM services to initiate searches from one Web interface, providing “one-stop searching” for many of NLM’s information resources or databases. It is being developed by the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications (LHNCBC) at the National Library of Medicine (NLM), a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

NIH Senior Health
This website for older adults was developed by the National Institute on Aging and the National Library of Medicine, both part of the National Institutes of Health

National Organization for Rare Disorders
Designed to give information about diseases which occur in fewer than 200,000 people in the U.S. It provides links to a database of rare disorders, an orphan drug database, a database of organizations, information on starting support groups, and much more. NORD is a federation of over 140 not-for-profit voluntary health organizations that serve people with rare diseases and disabilities. It is the primary non-governmental clearinghouse for information on over 5,000 rare disorders.

Our Bodies Ourselves
Our Bodies Ourselves (OBOS), also known as the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (BWHBC), is a nonprofit, public interest women’s health education, advocacy, and consulting organization.

OncoLink
OncoLink is designed to make it easy for the general public to navigate through the pages to obtain the information that they want. The home page has buttons and hypertext links. If you click on the buttons or the underlined text with your mouse, you will go directly to your area of interest.

PubMed
This site was designed to provide access to the current MEDLINE and then link to full-text articles where available from citations retrieved. A nice feature of PubMed is the ability to link to “related articles” when you find an article on your topic.

PubMed Central
PubMed Central (PMC) is the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s digital archive of life sciences journal literature. Access to PMC is free and unrestricted.

Self-Help Sourcebook OnLine
An online directory of national and local self-help groups that can provide information, fellowship, support group meetings and newsletters. The sourcebook is directly searchable by medical diagnosis or topic and is the largest directory of its kind.

Spinnaker Communication
Though written for the health professional, this website homepage begins with useful instruction for everyone interested in researching the medical literature. It provides some interesting and helpful links in its directory of medical resources for professionals.

TOXNET
Specialized Information Services, NLM, TOXNET, a cluster of databases on toxicology, hazardous chemicals, and related areas

Third Age
A site for older adults offering an online community for exploration of health and lifestyle issues through web site resources, community forums, chat rooms, personal stories and their own archives. Contains a marketplace of retail items

The Internet Pathology Laboratory for Medical Education
Created by Edward C. Klatt, MD, Department of Pathology at University of Utah, and intended to assist medical students to study pathology, this site contains 1,900 images along with text, tutorials, laboratory exercises, and examination items for self-assessment that demonstrate gross and microscopic pathologic findings associated with human disease conditions.

Virtual Hospital
Created by the University of Iowa , the Virtual Hospital digital library makes the Internet a useful medical reference and health promotion tool for health care providers and patients. The Virtual Hospital digital library contains hundreds of books and brochures for health care providers and patients.

U.S. Food and Drug Administration
Find out safety information for drugs (for human and animal use), cosmetics, food products, and medical and radiological devices. Free full-text of FDA Consumer magazine articles is available on the site (from 1995) and under the Health Professionals section you can access the Bad Bug Book (offering basic facts on food borne pathogenic organisms and natural toxins). The FDA Web Site Index is easy to use and interesting to browse. Check under “Web sites” for interesting links to selected non-government sites.