Last week, ABC announced drastic cuts for its newsroom staff. The situation is similar at CBS, which in early February reduced its news-gathering personnel. These pull-backs by the major networks, paralleled by lessening or flat-out elimination of newspapers, will boost the number of people who check the Internet for medical news.
Two recent studies, from the Pew Center’s Internet & American Life Project and the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, confirm that most Americans are going on-line for health information. Compounding this effect, in all likelihood, are the uninsured, those reluctant to fork out hefty co-pays and some who are unable to dole out a deductible before they see a doctor.
Bottom line: the role of Internet-based health resources is likely to expand over the next decade. We need to know what’s out there -
We should start with MedlinePlus, a virtual superstore of free medical information. Co-sponsored by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), this site is comprehensive and relatively clear of commercial bias. (There are significant exceptions, see below). It’s a useful origin for most any health-related search.
MedlinePlus covers more than 800 topics in English, 500 in Spanish and selective information in over 45 languages — you can read about anemia in Bosnian, hand hygiene in Creole or viral hepatitis in the Hmong language.
The site includes a medical dictionary, an encyclopedia (provided by A.D.A.M., a health education company that’s traded on the NASDAQ, ADAM), a compendium of drugs, supplements and herbs (put forth by the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists), a database on herbal remedies from Natural Standard, and some 165 interactive health tutorials.
There’s a direct link to the original on-line database that doctors used for decades, Medline/PubMed. This professional reference encompasses over 16 million articles published in more than 5000 scientific and medical journals. For the most part it’s a well-organized list of titles and abstracts, or summaries, of biomedical papers. A growing proportion of the articles are available in their entirety, and the abstracts can sometimes provide helpful clues in a medical search.
Another key connection is to ClinicalTrials.gov, an NIH-sponsored registry of all federally-sponsored and many privately-funded clinical trials conducted in the United States and elsewhere. For cancer patients, this database is crucial; previously, only doctors searching for clinical trials could access a public database of experimental treatments. (I’ll cover this site in a separate, future post.)
MedlinePlus offers an extensive catalogue of surgical procedure videos. You can watch an abdominal hysterectomy, vasectomy reversal or open heart surgery if you choose. While the films can be helpful, perhaps, to some patients who are deliberating about a procedure, some of my non-physician friends have found them rather bloody. I have some reservations about this component of the MedlinePlus site, in that many of the videos are provided by community medical centers and, the films are provided by a commercial enterprise, ORlive.
In recent years the number of visitors to MedlinePlus has hovered over 10 million per month. In 2009, the site received hits from approximately 128 million distinct Web addresses.
Last year, I spoke with Robert Logan, Ph.D., of the Office of Communications at the National Library of Medicine. “We’ve hit some sort of tipping point,” he said. “The internet has eclipsed other health information sources.”
Despite the comprehensiveness of MedlinePlus, there’s work to be done, said Logan. Some particular areas he hopes to improve on include ethics, epidemiology and statistics. “It’s hard for people to look at numbers and make clinical decisions,” he said. “But that’s a serious weakness in all areas of medicine all over the world.”