Covering the Waterfront
For substantive information of the highest quality, this scheme relies on links to six multifaceted web sites produced in association with foremost American health-care centers and medical libraries. It acknowledges the scope of their public service to call these sites online health-care hubs.
Whatever other sources you rely on, it is important to know what these leading hubs have to say. This is why their names turn up in so many online and paperbound directories of medical sites. The problem with this standard Web approach to guidance – lists of links – is that it tells nothing about how different kinds of medical information can contribute to health education. Here we chart a waterfront to suggest important differences in the educational nature of online materials.
Shallows
Our first two health-care hubs supply simple summaries for what traditional physicians and their aides call patient education. As printouts they amount to fact sheets, leaflets, brochures, and booklets. Most of these introductory overviews come from national associations of health-care professionals. Others are prepared by affiliates of well-regarded care centers and public health agencies. As a rule, these rundowns are reliable and practical, but shallow.
"Web Sources of Patient Education Handouts," at http://www.ohsu.edu/library/patiented/links.shtml, is a directory of health sites from Oregon Health Sciences University, a leading trainer of front-line physicians. In addition to a wide range of beginner-level materials in English, it links to collections of bilingual and translated documents for Spanish-speaking people. It includes especially simple presentations for people described as Low Literacy. And it offers some bilingual handouts for refugees with unusual backgrounds and others who speak in their native tongues. This hub also links to an online translation program that renders English-language web pages into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and, with an equipped computer and printer, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
It is important to note that the first section of this OHSU directory includes three sites – "Virtual Hospital," "NOAH," and "MEDLINEplus" – that weave easy-to-read materials into their more substantial offerings. To emphasize the importance of these substantial offerings, Health Angler places these sites where they best fit into its plan for incremental health education. To stick with this plan, you should also postpone consulting the specialty sites that OHSU lists as Other English Language Sites of Interest, waiting until you have the broadly based education it takes to make the most of them.
The University of Iowa’s "Virtual Hospital," at http://www.vh.org/index.html, offers the most varied range of beginner-level materials in English – everything from one-minute summaries to short essays. These standard presentations are supplemented with a catalogue of excerpts that the builders of "Virtual Hospital" have created for the U.S. Navy. This "Virtual Naval Hospital" features down-to-earth advice, much of it drawn from armed service manuals, for travelers and others without access to sophisticated medical amenities. Its recommendations for first aid cover everything from common accidents to catastrophic emergencies.
Currents
Our next two hubs publicize new possibilities by reporting on cutting-edge approaches in various realms of health care. Both make it easy to e-mail their materials to others. Each showcases the following:
-opinions of pioneering researchers
-advice from innovating practitioners
-commentaries that assess the practical implications of health news
-general expertise made applicable to the self-described situations of individuals and groups via interactive electronic tools
"MayoClinic.com," at http://www.mayoclinic.com, is the online home of the famous Mayo Clinic. Like its proud parent, it introduces and applies the best of multidisciplinary mainstream medicine.
"DrWeil.com," at http://www.drweil.com, is maintained by the father of alternative and complementary medicine at the University of Arizona. Dr. Andrew Weil’s online home does the best job of showing how alternative and complementary approaches are being integrated into Western medicine to produce a new hybrid called integrative medicine.
Mainstream
Our final two health-care hubs help people to broaden and to deepen their basic understandings using materials prepared by established American leaders of Western medicine. Both are extensive online collections of documents and supplementary aids that have been assembled, organized, and regularly updated by nationally recognized medical librarians.
"NOAH," at http://www.noah-health.org, is a creation of the New York Academy of Medicine and both university and public libraries. It makes especially ambitious efforts to supplement materials in English with their equivalents in Spanish.
"MEDLINEplus," at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus, comes from the National Library of Medicine, which produces a limited version of it in Spanish. Here is the single most versatile health-care hub on the Web. Among other things, whatever your self-selected topic, it makes it easy to jump from consumer education materials at every level and angle to latest reports on research from leading technical and professional journals.
Depths
All six of these health-care hubs combine what they consider the best of conventional medicine with contributions from alternative and complementary medicine they deem respectable. Each supplements its own holdings with carefully selected links to more specialized resources. Once you’re equipped to make the most of them, these specialty sources can be tapped to facilitate in-depth research and education of unsurpassed quality.
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