Visiting the library Regulatory issues are largely unresolved. The Federal Trade Commission has begun prosecuting sites making deceptive or fraudulent claims, but medicine is regulated at the state level, Deering says. Weise notes that many medical school libraries are open to the public, especially at state institutions. Even at those that are not open to the public, librarians sometimes will provide assistance to people who call or e-mail requests. People shouldn't hesitate to try to help themselves by searching online, Weise says.
Physicians have to know hundreds of conditions, but a patient can become an expert in just one.
The number of consumers digging into databases designed for health professionals has surprised even those who run them. Two years ago, about 7 million searches a year were done on the National Library of Medicine's Medline, a database of abstracts from medical journals used mostly by doctors and researchers. But in the two years it's been available free on the Web, the figure has skyrocketed to 180 million a year, says director Donald A.B. Lindberg. So the library began a push to make its medical data easier to use for the layperson without medical training. But in general, we know that the literature's damn hard to understand.