Website of the month

For January, I would like to highlight Medline Plus, a website put on by the NIH (National Institutes of Health) and the National Library of Medicine for patients.  The address is : http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/

If there are only two webpages that you put into your Favorites for medically related searches, they should be this one and www.kp.org.

What I like the most about this site is the quality of the information that it offers.  Here are some excerpts from Medline Plus' quality guidelines:

"Medline Plus is designed to help you find appropriate, authoritative health information."

"We also provide you with a database of full text drug and supplement information, an illustrated medical encyclopedia, a medical dictionary, interactive tutorials, and the latest health news."

"We focus on organizing the full text publications produced by the NIH Institutes and other Federal Government organizations."

"The quality guidelines we uses in evaluating links to Web pages include:
-The organization must provide accurate, science based info that complements or enhances then government info found on Medline Plus.
-The source of the content is established, respected, and dependable. The organization publishes a list of advisory board members or consultants on the site.
- Lists of links are evaluated, reviewed, and quality filtered."

The site itself is fairly user friendly, and while it may not be the slickest site on the web, I believe that the quality measures mentioned above more than make up for that.  So next time you want to look up some health related information, skip Google, and use either Medline Plus or kp.org.