And Now, the Story According to the Pros
Healthcommunities.com
Background: This site attempts to provide consumers with straight talk, all written and updated by doctors, on common diseases and conditions. Started in 1998 as UrologyChannel.com, Healthcommunities has now expanded to cover a dozen branches of medicine, such as cardiology, oncology and women’s health. Investors include drug companies and manufacturers of medical technology.
What Works: Healthcommunities is a good first stop on the Internet, a solid foundation from which you can begin to learn about many conditions. On the urology page, for example, the explanation of prostate cancer begins where it should--by answering the question, what is the prostate? The text then goes on to describe possible causes of prostate cancer, treatments and related conditions. Each of the channels provides news related to the subject, plus Internet links to learn more. The site also hosts regular live chats with doctors, if you have more specific questions and are willing to hand over your e-mail address.
What Doesn’t: Parents with young children will be surprised to find that there is no pediatrics channel; nor are there channels devoted to mental health, allergies or gastroenterology, to name a few. And although some of its pages, such as the one on urology, are well written, others lapse quickly into jargon. In the neurology channel, for example, epilepsy is described as “a recurrent seizure disorder caused by focal or generalized epileptogenic discharges from brain cells.” That’s no better than what you could get from a medical dictionary.
Medmatrix.org
Background: Medmatrix is a reference resource maintained by Slack Inc., a provider of health care information and educational materials. The site is mainly a catalog of reviews by medical professionals, devoted to “full-content, unrestricted-access” medical resources online.
What Works: It delivers what many of us e-health surfers long for: up-to-date health-site reviews from physicians and other health specialists. They have checked out an enormous number of Web pages, and they aren’t afraid to zing half-baked ones with a single star--”lacking in substance or currency.” Medmatrix is blessedly free of bells and whistles; it simply lists categories, from allergies to ophthalmology to viral diseases. By using Medmatrix to focus on the four- and five-star sites, you can save time looking for reliable information.
What Doesn’t: You have to register to use this catalog, turning over your name, e-mail address, and a postal address. And once you’re in, some of the ratings raise more questions than they answer. There is no explanation, for example, of why the McGill Gynecology Page gets four stars and OBGYN.net gets only two. It’s like reading the movie reviews in the back of a TV guidebook: You can see “Dr. Strangelove” got four stars, but it doesn’t tell you why. Also, unfortunately, Medmatrix is directed at “physicians and health care workers on the front line.” The sites reviewed tend to be technical. This won’t put everyone off; after all, consumers have made the research-heavy National Institutes of Health site one of the three most-visited in the e-health category. Still, it’s a shame Medmatrix doesn’t devote more space to popular consumer sites. That’s where most of us start when searching for health information on the Internet, and it would be nice to know whether we’re on the right track.
