Surfing Just for the Health of It

By Bill Fick

Given the the large portion of budgets around the world that go into health care, it should come as no surprise that medical information resources densely populate the Internet. Nothing like medicine unites the academic and research community, by whom and for whom the Internet was founded, with the self-interest and well being of every human on the planet.

In the last few weeks, a flurry articles appeared in American newspapers highlighting health on the Internet in response to a press conference where Vice President Albert Gore introduced a new on-line index of health resources sponsored by the U.S. government called HealthFinder (http://www.healthfinder.gov).

The healthfinder site is well-done and strives to bring order to the chaos of medicine on the Internet. Perhaps even more importantly, it annotates references to reputable resources while leaving aside the pernicious quackery and outrageous treatment claims that also infect the web.

The Switzerland-based Health on the Net Foundation, or HON, (http://www.hon.ch) takes a more participatory approach to quality control by calling on providers of health information to voluntarily pledge allegiance to an on-line "honor code". Medical sites which bear the HON seal of approval on their home pages have committed to dispense advice only from qualified professionals, seek to supplement and enrich, rather than replace, traditional doctor-patient relationships, maintain the strictest standards of patient confidentiality, accompany any data with clear attributions and references, and openly identify sources of financial sponsorship.

The HON site also includes its own searchable catalog of links, information about its "Global Hospital Project" to help physicians and institutions share information and experience worldwide on the net, and free, unlimited access to the renowned MedLine database of medical abstracts.

Another of my favorite medical search engines is called "ACHOO!" (http://www.achoo.com), not to be confused with its famous general-interest cousin YAHOO! (http://www.yahoo.com). With a searchable index of 7,000 medical addresses and more than 3 million hits from users, this resource is nothing to sneeze at.

A pharmacist-cum-Internet enthusiast runs a site called RxList (http://www.rxlist.com) which provides encyclopedic drug information, including cross-referenced tables of drug interactions and side effects. The next time you find ancient mystery capsules in your medicine cabinet you can enter the meaningless numbers imprinted on the side in RxList’s database to identify the substance.

The pharmaceutical industry also funds its own site called Druginfonet (http://www.druginfonet.com) which contains sober and extensive information about drug products as well as a collection of other useful health information and links. The site also sports an "ask the doctor/pharmacist" feature, were you can ostensibly send in your question and receive a reply from a medical professional.

One of the most information-rich and innovative Internet health services is Medscape (http://www.medscape.com) which publishes scholarly peer review articles across numerous categories as well as offering an array of quality consumer-oriented services.

Finally, no medical web tour would be complete without visits to the National Institutes of Health (http://www.nih.gov) and the Centers for Disease Control (http://www.cdc.gov). CDC’s site includes an excellent collection of travel advisories and vaccination recommendations, worth checking the next time you plan an exotic getaway from Moscow.

I was rather surprised to learn of the extent to which the medical community in Russia, particularly in Moscow, has adapted Internet technologies to its work. Even before the advent of the World Wide Web, the "Medicine for You" corporation, or MFY, a quasi-private information arm of the Russian Ministry of Health, had developed an array of dozens of e-mail based conferences and mailing lists around different medical topics. Nearly all of Moscow’s apteky, or pharmacies, subscribe to the service, which is used to distribute official orders and regulations from the government, discuss concrete disease issues, and exchange information about licensing and availability of medications.

MFY’s website (http://www.medlux.ru) contains interactive databases containing pharmaceutical certification and licensing data, government documents, and information on the availability of specific pharmaceuticals in Moscow pharmacies. You can enter a "shopping basket" of medicines to receive a list of apteky that carry all of them, and choose the most convenient location based on metro station, and check their working hours and phone number.

You will also find the Ministry of Health’s official homepage, archives of MFY’s e-mail conferences, an on-line version of their glossy newspaper, a library of various medical texts in Russian, and a good, regularly updated set of links to other medical resources on the Russian net. The volume of Russian health resources is impressive and runs the gamut from medical research and teaching institutions to journals to a handful of Russian pharmaceutical and medical equipment distributors.

I haven’t yet seen a Russian website among any of the global pharmaceutical giants active on the market here, but given their saturation of TV advertising my guess is that it won’t be long before they catch the web bug.