Health Online: How to Find Health Information, Support Groups, and Self-Help Communities in Cyberspace

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Summary: Face-to-Face Is Not Enough
Review: Between 7:00pm and 1:00am is a good time to get answers to a health care system moving from the traditional office face-to-facing with doctors to self-managed lay medicine online. A good way to surf these Internet health and medical resources is by signing up with a computer network, such as America Online, CompuServe, Delphi, eWorld, Genie, Microsoft Windows 95, Prodigy, The Well, or Women's Wire. Self-helpers can then access such biomedical databases as the HealthNet Reference Library, Information USA/health, and Medline; Internet mailing lists, such as HMATRIX-L's popular and professional resources for laypeople and professionals; the Medical Support Bulletin Board; the Medical Matrix gopher site; the MedWeb free medical library; and USENET newsgroups. Such directories and search engines as InternetSleuth, the Multimedia Medical Reference Library, and the Whole Internet Catalog of Health can find relevant web sites ranging from Good Medicine alternative and mainstream medical practices, to Internet Vet, PharmInfoNet, Traveler's Choice worldwide health conditions, and Yahoo/health.

Or a health information broker---such as The Health Resource Inc., Med Help International, and Plane Tree Health Resource Center---could be hired to do all the footwork. Or a non-digital start would be to call the Self-Help Clearinghouse and to read THE SELF-HELP SOURCEBOOK. This self-help focus by author and physician Tom Ferguson works well with John M. Grohol's THE INSIDER'S GUIDE TO MENTAL HEALTH RESOURCES ONLINE. Readers trying to pool as much Internet health and medical information as possible could also look to Bruce Maxwell's HOW TO FIND HEALTH INFORMATION ON THE INTERNET and MOSBY'S MEDICAL SURFARI.