Handout of the month — Uplink Archive

This article provides journalists with comprehensive resources for researching health and medical topics, including reference books, internet directories, medical databases, and contact information for government health agencies.

Medicine and health resources

Good reference books:

Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1994 [28th ed.]) Stedman's Medical Dictionary (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1995 [26th ed.]) The American Medical Association Family Medical Guide (New York: Random House, 1994) The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy (Rahway, N.J.: Merck & Co., 1992 [16th ed.]) The Physicians' Desk Reference (Montvale, N.J.: Medical Economics, 1996 [50th ed.]) The Control of Communicable Diseases Manual (Washington, D.C.: American Public Health Association, 1995 [16th ed.])

Internet directories

Medical "nodes" or "hubs" on the World Wide Web can be good starting points for gathering background information. Such sites include MedWeb (http://www.emory.edu/WHSCL/medweb.html), Medical Matrix (http://www.kumc.edu:80/mmatrix/), and Yahoo-Health (http://www.yahoo.com/Health). Of course, medical information on the Web varies greatly in quality; thus, let the browser beware. Among books that may aid in finding Internet resources are Dr. Tom Linden's Guide to Online Medicine (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995) and The Internet Health, Fitness, and Medicine Yellow Pages (Berkeley, Calif.: Osborne McGraw-Hill, 1995). Given the rapid growth of the Internet, such books cannot be fully up-to-date. However, they may provide at least initial direction.

Journal articles

Articles in medical journals also can serve as useful background. Such articles can most readily be identified through the National Library of Medicine (NLM) database MEDLINE. Sources of access to MEDLINE include medical (and some other) libraries, some commercial online services, and NLM (see http://igm.nlm.nih.gov). To identify articles providing overviews of given areas, you can search MEDLINE specifically for review articles.

Agencies

Among government agencies, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is particularly geared to providing health information to reporters. The NIH homepage, through which the homepages of various NIH institutes can be reached, may be accessed at http://www.nih.gov/home.html

Phone numbers of media contacts at selected NIH components are:

National Cancer Institute, (301) 496-6641 National Eye Institute, (301) 496-5248 National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, (301) 496-4236 National Institute on Aging, (301) 496-1752 National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, (301) 443-3860 National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, (301) 402-1663 National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, (301) 496-8188 National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, (301) 496-5133 National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, (301) 496-7243 National Institute of Dental Research, (301) 496-4261 National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, (301) 496-3583 National Institute on Drug Abuse, (301) 443-1124 National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, (919) 541-3345 National Institute of Mental Health, (301) 443-4536 National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, (301) 496-5924 National Institute of Nursing Research, (301) 496-0207 Office of Alternative Medicine, (301) 496-1712

If unsure which NIH component(s) to consult about a topic, you can search the NIH information index at gopher://gopher.nih.gov:70/11/clin/nih-infobook or call the main NIH telephone number, (301) 496-4000.

Other government information sources include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (http://www.cdc.gov/cdc.html, media phone number (404) 639-3286) and the Food and Drug Administration (http://fdahomepage.htm media phone number (301) 443-3285). CDC has an automated fax information service providing fact sheets and other documents on diseases and other health topics; for information, call (404) 332-4565.

Medical Librarians

Medical librarians can aid greatly in finding written and electronic sources of information. Such individuals are readily contacted at the libraries of medical schools.

The National Library of Medicine online database DIRLINE can help identify volunteer and medical associations and government agencies. On the Internet, DIRLINE may be accessed by typing "telnet locator.nlm.nih.gov" and then selecting "Directory of Information Resources" from the menu; it also may be reached from the NLM Locator page at (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/databases/locator.html). Institutional sources may be identified through the American Association for the Advancement of Science directory "Science Sources" (http://sci.aaas.org/sources/). And the standard reference work the Encyclopedia of Associations has a section listing more than 2,000 health and medical organizations.