The Internet for Physicians.

The Internet for Physicians offers novice users an overview of this new electronic communication system and its components. This second edition contains three sections, including “Basics,” “Applications,” and “Advanced Surfing.” The first section discusses what the Internet is and what it can do for the user. Among the covered topics, hardware options and modems present fundamentals needed for comprehension of the Internet. Information about remote access, Internet service providers, electronic mail (email), and chat rooms add to the value of this section. The second section, “Internet Applications,” delves more thoroughly into some of these topics and adds others, including newsgroups and medical informatics. The authors explain the anatomy of an email message, Internet etiquette, and chat room safety. Records management, patient education, and expert systems are included in the information provided in the medical informatics portion. “Advanced Surfing,” the final section, incorporates a brief introduction to hypertext markup language (HTML) with a discussion of advantages of creating a Web page. Tips for designing effective pages and Internet security make this section quite helpful for beginners. Appendices range from a lengthy bibliography of sources for finding additional information to health-related Internet resources categorized by specialty. A corresponding CD-ROM, included with the book, enables users to link directly to recommended sites. The Internet for Physicians will assist anyone starting to use such a system, physician or nonphysician. Some of the terminology is aimed at the medical mentality, but the overview is written in fairly straightforward language and provides illustrations to support its information. Discussion of various search engines and their idiosyncrasies will be of immense help to those unfamiliar with surfing the Internet. What differentiates this book from an introductory text is the chapter on medical informatics. However, while the data is helpful, it does not encompass the breadth and depth of the subject. The section on “Reference Support and Networking” fails to mention PubMed or Internet Grateful Med (IGM). Using Dialog and CompuServe are listed as user-friendly ways to gain access to databases. Even in a portion on the National Library of Medicine, PubMed and IGM are omitted. The author advises readers dial into MEDLARS. For this second edition to be meaningful for the user, the authors should have included the most up-to-date methods of searching the medical literature. Telemedicine receives only a cursory mention. The reader does not get a feel for the importance of the Internet in terms of rural medicine and radiology or the use of the Internet to promote medical education via teleconferences. These serious omissions render this book out of date, despite its 1999 copyright. The authors seem more interested in office automation than in facilitation of medical research and education, and focus on personal computing tasks such as desktop publishing, patient scheduling, and accounting. A majority of the suggested Websites in appendix two and on the corresponding CD-ROM are useful. However, there are a few questionable sites, such as the Tampax tampons home page (http://www.Tampax.com) and the Museum of Menstruation (http://www.mum.org). This book is useful for physicians who are not technologically advanced and need a primer on Web surfing. In terms of medical informatics, it is not recommended. Readers would be advised to consult sources such as Evaluation Methods in Medical Informatics (Springer-Verlag, 1997) by Friedman or Guide to Medical Informatics, the Internet, and Telemedicine by Coiera (Chapman and Hall, 1997).