Part one of this article covered general medical information websites and websites to use to obtain license and certification information on physicians. This article discusses medical and health related information sites useful in obtaining more specific medical information. This includes drug information, practice guidelines, Medline, journal articles, health statistics, morbidity/mortality disease trends, and managed care information as well as a few sites devoted to a particular disease or condition.

Drug Information

A good site to use to obtain information on drugs/medications is RxList (www.rxlist.com), which was founded and is maintained by a licensed pharmacist. This site claims to cover all drugs on the U.S. market or close to FDA approval. At last count, information was available on approximately 5,000 drugs.

A search can be run by drug name or keyword. Information available for a particular drug may include its chemical description, clinical pharmacology, indications and dosage, contraindications, side effects, interactions with other drugs, method of administration and cost. An additional feature at this site is a link to Taber's Medical Encyclopedia, which can be used to obtain the definition of more than 53,000 medical terms.

Practice Guidelines

Clinical practice guidelines for a particular disease or condition can be helpful in determining the standard of care in a medical malpractice case. The National Guideline Clearinghouse (www.guideline.gov) is a comprehensive searchable database of current clinical practice guidelines. It is sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, in partnership with the American Medical Association and the American Association of Health Plans.

This database provides a summary of each guideline along with information on how to obtain the full-text of the guideline.

Publications

Medline, the National Library of Medicine's (NLM) database of medical article citations, is considered the premier index to the world's biomedical literature. Its coverage emphasizes journal articles on clinical, dental and veterinary medicine, medical research, nursing, and health care administration. Medline's coverage of articles is from 1953 to the present and at last count contained bibliographic citations to over fourteen million different articles.

Three different types of article citations are included: publisher supplied citations, which may be online even before the article is published; preMedline, which are citations to articles that have not yet been indexed by NLM; and full Medline, which are citations to articles which have been read by an indexer at NLM and assigned Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). These MeSH terms act as a controlled vocabulary and help the searcher retrieve articles on point.

NLM offers Medline through a free searching system called PubMed (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed), which is geared to the health professional as well as to the lay person. PubMed should be searched using both free text terms (to retrieve the most recent articles that have not yet been indexed) and MeSH subject headings, which can be accessed on the PubMed site. A little familiarity with the site is necessary to assure a thorough and accurate search. An extensive "search help" document is available on the site.

Healthfinder's journal link page is a good site to use to search individual medical publications (healthfinder.gov/scripts/SearchContext.asp?topic=997). The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services developed this gateway health information website especially for consumers. The journal link page allows you to search 103 different medical publications. Journal date coverage varies, as does the ability to search full text, article abstract, or table of contents. In some cases, a copy of the article is available at no charge. In most cases, the article can be ordered online with payment by credit card.

Statistical Information

For a searchable database of morbidity or mortality in a particular geographic area, consult the Center for Disease Control's (CDC) MMWR website at www.cdc.gov/mmwr. This corresponds to the print MMWR ("Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report"), that has been used by health professionals for many years to track disease trends.

Health related statistics can be obtained from the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics at www.cdc.gov/nchs. Choose FASTATS (Fast Statistics) A-Z and select a keyword. The results returned will be statistics related to your topic, which have been extracted from a more comprehensive document.

Managed Care

Consult the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Service's (CMS) website (cms.hhs.gov) for managed care information, especially regarding Medicare or Medicaid. CMS was formerly known as the Health Care Financing Administration. This site is geared towards consumers, medical care providers, and researchers.

For an evaluation of a particular managed care plan, consult The National Committee for Quality Assurance's (NCQA) website (www.ncqa.org). NCQA is an independent, non-profit organization whose mission is to evaluate and report on the quality of managed care organizations in the United States.

Specific Diseases

The website of a society or association devoted to a specific disease or condition is usually the best resource for information about that specific disease /condition. The following websites are examples of useful society or association websites.

The American Cancer Society's website (www.cancer.org) is an excellent site for information on prevention, detection, and treatment of various types of cancer.

The National Cancer Institute's (NCI) site (http://cancer.gov/cancerinformation) is another good place to go to obtain recent, comprehensive information relating to cancer. One particularly useful feature about the NCI's site is the inclusion of two different sets of treatment options -- one written for the patient, the other written for the health professional.

The American Heart Association's site (www.americanheart.org) contains information on the warning signs and risks of heart disease as well as a heart and stroke A-Z guide.

The Cardiothoracic Surgery Network (www.ctsnet.org) is a collaborative effort of most of the major cardiothoracic surgical organizations around the world. It contains information useful to both medical professionals and the general public. Clinical resources, experts' techniques, and controversies in cardiothoracic surgical treatments are just some of the types of information available here.

The American Lung Association's website (www.lungusa.org) contains information about lung diseases A-Z, occupational lung disease, data and statistics on lung disease and current research in the field.

The American Diabetes Association's website (www.diabetes.org/homepage.jsp) contains information on type 1 and type 2 diabetes, treatment information for health professionals, and links to community resources helpful for people with diabetes or for their family members.