Medicine Page

This page provides a handy guide to Medical Sites worth checking out

From the National Library of Medicine, the www.medlineplus.gov website is geared towards patients and families and often has handouts in Spanish as well.  This includes links to many other websites providing patient and family education, including MayoClinic.com, Nemours Foundation handouts for kids, teens, and parents, various institutions of the NIH, etc.  I like the information from www.nimh.nih.gov on mental illnesses as well.

Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children has a section on child physiology (www.sickkids.on.ca/childphysiology) detailing heart, lung and brain function in an interactive display format, with plans to add other organ systems in the future.  I also like the heart diagrams of the Royal Children’s Hospital (Melbourne, Australia) to give to parents or use as a refresher, www.rch.unimelb.edu.au/Cardiology/website/Library/library.html.

Telability is Josh Alexander’s (peds PM&R) website devoted to children with disabilities.  Particularly valuable for families are handouts in English and Spanish regarding may disabilities issues, although physicians may find the links and calendar helpful.

National Organization for Rare Disorders is a charity devoted to education and support for “orphan” diseases.  Their website has sections on reports, articles, advocacy, and support groups for these diseases which would otherwise have greater difficulty finding a voice because relatively few people are affected by the disorder.

The National Med-Peds Residents’ Association website - While geared towards residents, this website also has sections regarding general MedPeds information, links to other websites (including the Medicine Pediatric Program Director’s Association), and information for medical students considering a career in MedPeds.

The American Academy of Pediatrics section on MedPeds - The AAP’s site devotes some time to the role of MedPeds physicians in today’s workforce, including salary, specialization, practice opportunities, etc., with a comprehensive section on searching for the right job.

Med-Peds Resources on the Web -  built through Wright State University, this website has links to all the residencies, some recruitment firms, and administrative items such as program requirements.

UpToDate – If you haven’t yet heard of the collection of topic summaries and evidence-based reviews that comprises UpToDate, I’d be surprised.  But you may not know that the pediatrics portion is steadily being expanded, you can get CME credits, and that there are online, CD-ROM, and pocket PC version available for subscription fees ranging from $0 for those lucky enough to have UNC’s institutional access to $495 for physicians on their own.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website: The CDC has a wealth of information on its website.  In particular, the sections on traveler’s health and vaccines are useful for both physicians and for patient handouts.  You can sign up to receive the MMWR via email for free and find government statistics and links.

Google image search - is a wonderful service from the popular search engine of which many are unaware.  Type in “porphyria cutanea tarda” or “melanosis coli” and up pop a dozen websites with photos of the requested disease, often within a website with clinical information about the disease as well.

National Guideline Clearinghouse -  Over 1000 clinical guidelines are referenced here, organized by issuing organization or by disease, along with annotated bibliographies.

Information on genetic diseases can be found through GeneReviews and the Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM) database, recently moved to the PubMed site, a well-known free medical literature search engine.  PubMed’s latest search strategy, Entrez, will search all the databases concomitantly.  These can all be reached here.

Alternative Medicine sites – Herbmed.org provides a list of trials done with herbal medications to give you access to information pertaining to efficacy and safety of various alternative medicines.  The World Health Organization website contains some information about acupuncture, traditional health practitioners, and herbal medicines. The monographs (www.who.int/medicines/library/trm/medicinalplants/monographs) provide a summary of medicinal herbs and their uses.  The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine division of the NIH also has excellent information about clinical trials.

Emedicine has some pretty reasonable review articles on a variety of topics, and while the WebMD website is a bit commercial, the Medscape section has some of the news and information from both medical journals and the lay press that your patients will be asking you about.

www.normalkid.com/page and www.normalkid.com/peds - these websites, created by a 2003 graduate (Arnold Kim) of UNC’s internal medicine residency, allow you to send an alphanumeric message to any of the medicine or pediatrics residents.  A number of fellows and attendings have also signed up to have messages delivered, and anyone with a 216 pager can add their name to receive group pages. 

This portal website shows the online offerings of UNC’s Health Sciences Library.  Most of the ejournals and clinical resources can only be accessed by UNC affiliates and require a university PID, but there are a number of journals with free internet access.

These are the official UNC Pediatric Department website and the UNC Residents’ website, respectively, and the corresponding UNC Medicine site for the official internal medicine department and this one for the residents.  

Look up any physician (or nurse practitioner, etc.) in North Carolina, renew your license online, etc., through the North Carolina Medical Board’s site.