Health Information Resources

[Deborah]

I have finally finished my third semester of library school (whew!) and want to share the resources from the health information class.

I'll post web sites and a little information about each.

In a few days, after I see the eye doctor, I'll go back and reopen the PubMed how to search thread.

All of the links should be public and accessible, but if I screw up and there are some closed ones, I apologize in advance. I can't tell from my computer if something is closed to the public. So let me know if any of the links don't work.

Nana

[Deborah]

Consumer Health Links

Just a quick disclaimer: I'm not actually recommending any of these sites as trustworthy (they may or may not be truthful at any given time). This is sort of like a visit to the library where the librarian waves an arm at shelves of books and says: "See what you can find for yourself."

Here are a couple of basic consumer health sites:

Consumer Health Information Center at the Toronto Public Library

http://www.tpl.toronto.on.ca/uni_chi_index.jsp

Consumer health information is any information that people need to make informed decisions about their health. Access to this information allows public participation and choice in health care decision making.

This is the one from the U.K. National Health Service Direct


And here is good ol' Medline Plus from the National Library of Medicine:
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/

More to come...

Additions:
For the Canadians on the board: here is Health Canada (English version, French is also available)
http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/english/index.html

a non-governmental organization:
Canadian Institute for Health Information
http://secure.cihi.ca/cihiweb/splash.html

[Deborah]

some more resources

Two that are sort of alternative health - this one is government sponsored...

Who We Are
The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) is 1 of the 27 institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH is one of eight agencies under the Public Health Service (PHS) in the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).

And this one, Bastyr University Library, is not government sponsored...
http://www.bastyr.edu/library/

Books: We have over 11,000 volumes on a broad range of naturopathic and alternative medicine topics, from acupuncture, botanical medicine and cancer to X-rays, yoga and zen meditation. There are also basic medical works in such areas of study as anatomy, physiology, physical diagnosis, and more specialized areas, such as cardiology, dermatology, gynecology, internal medicine, nutrition, pediatrics, etc. Books are catalogued according to the Library of Congress system and can be found in our computerized card catalog </library/resources/catalog.asp> by subject, author, call number, key word, or title.

[Deborah]

THE ESTABLISHMENT SITES

This takes you to a search screen for several resources at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

http://gateway.nlm.nih.gov/gw/Cmd

The NLM Gateway allows users to search in multiple retrieval systems at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM). The current Gateway searches MEDLINE/PubMed, LOCATORplus, MEDLINEplus, ClinicalTrials.gov, DIRLINE, Meeting Abstracts, and HSRProj. See the Overview <Cmd?Overview.x> for details.

Here is a link to the Medical Subject Headings Thesaurus (MeSH)
Librarian are very fond of MeSH because it is the absolute creme de la creme of indexing systems. The quality of the material being indexed is another story. MeSH can also be accessed from within PubMed. This system provides you with more extensive information on the terms, however.

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/

The Thesaurus
MeSH is the National Library of Medicine's controlled vocabulary thesaurus. It consists of sets of terms naming descriptors in a hierarchical structure that permits searching at various levels of specificity.

This is the link for PubMed:

http://www.ncbi.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi

PubMed, a service of the National Library of Medicine, includes over 14 million citations for biomedical articles back to the 1950's. These citations are from MEDLINE and additional life science journals. PubMed includes links to many sites providing full text articles and other related resources
MEDLINE® (Medical Literature, Analysis, and Retrieval System Online) is the U.S. National Library of Medicine's (NLM) premier bibliographic database that contains over 12 million references to journal articles in life sciences with a concentration on biomedicine. Time coverage: 1966 to the present

Link to pre 1966 material: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/services/oldmed.html.

More about PubMed:

Source: Citations from over 4,600 worldwide journals currently in 30 languages; 40 languages for older journals cited back to 1966. About 52% of current cited articles are published in the U.S.; for the time period 1997-2001, nearly 89% of cited articles are published in English and about 76% have English abstracts written by authors of the articles. Citations for MEDLINE are created by the NLM, international partners, and collaborating organizations.
Updates: Beginning in 2002 over 2,000 completed references are added daily each Tuesday through Saturday, January through October (over 460,000 added last year). Updates are irregular in November and December as NLM makes the transition to a new year of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®) vocabulary used to index the articles. Broad coverage: Basic biomedical research and the clinical sciences since 1966 including nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, pharmacy, allied health, and pre-clinical sciences. MEDLINE also covers life sciences that are vital to biomedical practitioners, researchers, and educators, including some aspects of biology, environmental science, marine biology, plant and animal science as well as biophysics and chemistry. Increased coverage of life sciences began in 2000. By the end of 2001, most citations previously included in separate NLM specialty databases had also been added to MEDLINE.

The posts above include about half of what we covered in our first class.

More tomorrow

Nana

Additions:
World Health Organization
http://www.who.int/en/
(This is probably THE ESTABLISHMENT all by its lonesome)

[Deborah]

overall plan for this thread

I'll be adding more sites to various posts above. For example, I have two more than can be considered as consumer health and one for THE ESTABLISHMENT.

Anyone who wants can add posts with their most valued sites. Please feel free. The only thing I'd like is for people to tag sites that have commercial content, either ads or an underlying marketing theme. As a pending librarian I feel that it is important for people to know before they jump!

Cheers!

Nana

[Deborah]

Medical Dictionaries

So, why could we possibly need links to medical dictionaries? Just wondering...

Medline Plus
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/mplusdictionary.html

Medterms.com Medical Dictionary
http://www.medterms.com/script/main/hp.asp

Whonamedit.com is a biographical dictionary of medical eponyms. It is our ambition to present a complete survey of all medical phenomena named for a person, with a biography of that person. Eventually, this will include more than 15.000 eponyms and more than 6.000 persons.

http://www.whonamedit.com/

NIH Cancer.gov Dictionary
http://cancer.gov/dictionary/

National Organization of Rare Diseases
http://www.rarediseases.org/search/rdblist.html

Gene Tests: Welcome to the GeneTests Web site, a publicly funded medical genetics information resource developed for physicians, other healthcare providers, and researchers, available at no cost to all interested persons.

http://www.genetests.org/

Medical Abbreviations Dictionary, among other things. Not an advertising free site.
http://www.pharma-lexicon.com/

For looking up organizational and medical acronyms (aconyms means abbreviations in non-jargon)
http://www.geocities.com/~mlshams/acronym/acr.htm

More medical reference links
http://www-hsl.mcmaster.ca/tomflem/dictionary.html

And for those who are never satisfied, a list of specialized medical dictionaries, by subject.
http://dmoz.org/Reference/Dictionari...ject/Medicine/

Nana