Their biographies and credentials are listed at the site ensuring professional expertise. Despite the authority of the governing body, remember that patients still need to consult their own doctors before making inferences about their own medical conditions. Sources of information should be clearly indicated and articles should cite peer-reviewed, published studies. To check authenticity, the National Library of Medicine offers free access to Medline , a database of 9 million abstracts from 4,000 journals. The National Cancer Institute's CancerNet also links to journal articles, as well as to ongoing clinical trials.
Medicine changes fast, but unlike print materials, a Web site can change with it.
Note when the material was posted and check to see that the site regularly reviews its own content. Several Web sites are available for help with evaluating content. Eventually, health and medical sites may use various endorsements indicating that they abide by a set criteria. Groups such as Health on the Net and the Health Information Technology Institute are working towards that goal. Healthfinder.gov Healthfinder is a gateway to thousands of medical resources ranging from the National Institutes of Health to the American Heart Association and is one of the most respected sites for health resources on the Web.