Health & Medical Information on the Internet: Part Three

This is the third and final installment in the Health & Medical Information on the Internet series of articles. I hope it's useful for consumers, librarians, researchers, and anyone else interested in locating and assessing health and medical information on the Internet.

In Part One of the pathfinder I focussed on evaluation, and in Part Two I presented some good general starting points for finding health and medical information.

Here in Part Three some helpful databases and a few subject-specific resources are presented. Just like the resources listed in parts one and two of this pathfinder, many of the resources listed here can be found indexed in the Librarians' Index to the Internet or at Invisible-Web.net.

Thanks for reading!

Databases

MEDLINEplus and PubMed
Two wonderful databases from the National Library of Medicine. I particularly like the MEDLINEPlus Encyclopedia. Ever wonder what the difference between MEDLINEplus and PubMed is?

"MEDLINE is NLM's database of 11 million indexed journal citations and abstracts now covering nearly 4,500 journals published in the United States and more than 70 other countries. Available for online searching since 1971, MEDLINE includes references to articles indexed from 1966 to the present. All citations in MEDLINE are assigned MeSH® Terms and Publication Types from NLM's controlled vocabulary. MEDLINE citations and abstracts are available as the primary component of NLM's PubMed database, which is searchable via the Internet.

In addition to providing access to MEDLINE, PubMed provides access to:

The out-of-scope citations (e.g., articles on plate tectonics or astrophysics) from certain MEDLINE journals, primarily general science and chemistry journals, for which the life sciences articles are indexed for MEDLINE. Citations that precede the date that a journal was selected for MEDLINE indexing. Some additional life science journals that submit full text to PubMedCentral™ and receive a qualitative review by NLM. Users can limit their retrieval to MEDLINE citations by clicking on Limits on the PubMed Home Page and selecting MEDLINE from the Subsets pull-down menu. Citations prior to the mid-1960s are located in OLDMEDLINE."

CDC Wonder
The CDC Wonder Database "provides a single point of access to a variety of CDC reports, guidelines, and numeric public health data."

Combined Health Information Database
"CHID is a bibliographic database produced by health-related agencies of the Federal Government. This database provides titles, abstracts, and availability information for health information and health education resources."

Diseases & Conditions

All the general sites listed in Part Two of this pathfinder are great sources for information relating to diseases and conditions:

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