Google medical search

June 2, 2008 8:26 AM

What are the most reliable or authoritative sources of traditional medical information on the internet? I'd like to make a list of sites and use it as the basis of a Google custom search engine.
posted by bbranden1 to Health & Fitness (6 answers total)

I've had great luck at Up To Date and the Mayo Clinic website. For Up To Date, click the "for patients" option.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 8:47 AM on June 2, 2008 [1 favorite]

The best place to start is MedlinePlus from the National library of Medicine and you may also find the Medical Librarian Association's info useful.

Someone's already done a GCS for medical information: medworm
posted by cestmoi15 at 8:56 AM on June 2, 2008

Wrong Diagnosis.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 9:42 AM on June 2, 2008

pubmed.org is a database of citations (and, where available, full-text articles) from the biomedical literature, primarily peer-reviewed journals.
posted by docgonzo at 9:50 AM on June 2, 2008

This is a broad topic, so I put a few links below that may be helpful.

If you begin to focus on particular therapeutic areas rather than all of medicine, here are a few that fit your criteria and are always updated -- but please note that the first two are for oncology rather than all medicine:

ASCO. The most current oncology information will be reported here (eg, results of a randomized clinical trial, etc.). In the search box, enter your search term. Not only will you get the results related to your topic, but click on a particular abstract result and look at the bottom of the page. Frequently there are lectures in the format of either ppt or a video lecture of the results. A lot of information you here related to oncology is first reported at this conference.

National Cancer Comprehensive Network This site includes consensus guidelines for several types of cancer, which are updated every few months by experts in the field. Withiin each guideline is a review of the currently accepted treatement regimens (eg, 2 phase III clinical trials improved overall lifespan vs placebo by X months, etc.).

I would also recommend that if you are going to search for medications (indications, side effects, black box warnings) you use the search term "prescribing information PDF" -- sometimes there is a change as to how the medication is prescribed (eg, gefiitinb) -- if you read the prescribing information document, the infomration is provided there.
posted by Wolfster at 5:44 PM on June 2, 2008

eMedicine from WebMD (http://www.emedicine.com/) seems targeted towards doctors but is one of the more readable "for professionals" type sites.

Pubmed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/) is where the actual biomedical research gets published, but depending on your background actual research articles may be hard to understand. Also, it is sometimes hard to get full-text articles, not just abstracts, without a university library account or similar institutional access.

For diseases with a genetic nature, this is a good site (http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov).

Many of the institutes of the NIH (nih.gov) have good articles online, which are probably easiest to find through google as "conditionname site:nih.gov"

RxList is nice for looking up drugs (www.rxlist.com)

Up To Date (previously mentioned above) is a great site as well
posted by david06 at 9:26 PM on June 2, 2008