Only the Internet . . .
to publish as does a book, nor the same need to sell large numbers of copies to a sensation-hungry public. What you will find among the myriad of larger sites, on sleep disorders, for example, is a mini-course on sleep medicine for the public. You can get this for free, you can sample bits of this and that site, you can compare as many different sites as you like to gain a sense of any real controversies. One such site of many in the area of sleep disorders is KnowSleep, at http://www.knowsleep.com.
At some sites, you will even find quizzes to help test your knowledge!
Easy Access to Professional Journals and Research Reports
Have you ever tried to look up something in a professional medical journal? If you have, you have discovered that your local public library doesn't have these journals. Your local hospital, medical school, or university does, but often you can't use those facilities, or perhaps you can but you must pay a fee. This doesn't lend itself to casual browsing!
However, more and more, medical journals are becoming available on line--and not just to doctors. For example, if you have a sleep disorder, you might check out one journal published entirely on the Internet--Sleep Research Online at http://www.sro.org. Another remarkable service available to anyone who wants to use it is the NAPS site that weekly publishes abstracts of all recent research publications in the area of sleep medicine--and will e-mail you notification of publications in an area of your special interest!
Fine and good, you might say, but how am I to understand these articles? They don't make good leisure reading either!
Many of those same sites I've mentioned--and many others, including my own, entitled "A Doctor with Sleep Apnea Reviews Recent Research for Fellow Patients" at http://www.geocities.com/klwhitemd/index.html offer "translations" of the medical jargon into common English and even provide commentaries to help you view critically these often abstruse reports.
If your own doctor can understand and keep up with the flood of new research findings in sleep medicine, you have found a gem! But often you might be the first to make him aware of something new--of benefit to both him and you.
The point of all this is not provide you with a health guide to the Internet--a project fit for a large web site not yet constructed. It is to make you aware that the only the Internet can
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