The Internet for Beginners

The title of Dr. Peter J. Ziemkowski’s presentation—“A Beginner’s Guide to Finding and Using Internet Medical Information”—both intrigued and worried me. Surely he was using the term “beginner” in jest. In this day and age of ubiquitous Internet use, there just can’t be that many beginners left, can there?

Has MDNG been laboring in vain lo these many years? Apparently so, if the turnout at Dr. Z’s talk is any indication. There were many, many physicians in that room who self-identified as beginners when it comes to using online medical information in practice. They came to the right place, though, because Ziemkowski briskly walked the group through the staggering array of quality sites available to physicians and patients interested in conducting research online.

www.medmatrix.org

. Throughout his talk, he stressed that the number of quality sites is constantly expanding and that any list one can make is likely to be obsolete before too long. This presentation also drove home the fact that for many physicians, the Internet remains an untapped resource, which underscores (for me at least) the need for sources like MDNG to continue in our efforts to educate physicians and patients on the best ways to incorporate online healthcare information into modern healthcare practice.

and www.ganfyd.org

Many of the sites will be old news to MDNG readers, who have long had PubMed, the CDC website, and the various NIH offerings in their “Favorites” folder. Still, Ziemkowski did highlight a couple sites that I was not familiar with, including