Lynxes
Here are a few sites MrJumbo finds of interest, arranged loosely by topic.
Health Resources
Last update: 5/4/97
One of the places MrJumbo works is a magazine called American Health for Women. Here are some health resources on the Web, culled from various places. This will never be a final edit of the list (too many new sites open every day), so some of the categories and descriptions are a little sketchy; please bear with us as we add current information and continue to rearrange this in a (hopefully) more coherent order.
Even More Links
You'll find a great overall list of health links on the Net at Emory University's MedWeb: Biomedical Internet Resources, including Websites, newsgroups, and mailing lists on all sorts of medical topics, from AIDS to virtual reality in medicine. Many of the other sites listed here also have lists of hot links.
News Providers
Women's Health
A variety of Websites have sprung up over the past several months devoted to women's health in particular. Some of these are pretty good.
Consumer-Oriented Sites
- Online Health Topics from the Internet Health Resources Company, which is dedicated to providing extensive infertility information online.
- Go Ask Alice!
Columbia University's student health services offers a wide range of information in question-and-answer format.
- The UCLA Student Health Service Handouts
Practical information on a broad number of specific health issues, from testicular self-examination to irritable bowel syndrome.
- MedSeek - Internet Directory to Physicians and Services
This is a nifty idea -- a physician search service that includes a couple of hundred thousand doctors who have paid to be in the list, sorted geographically, by specialty and by name. Since the doctors provide information on themselves, it tells you more about individual doctors (assuming the doctors are telling the truth) than the similar AMA Physician Select service, but the AMA registry includes the better part of a million doctors in the U.S., almost all the board-certified physicians around (also sorted geographically, by specialty and by name). If you're looking for a new doctor, or trying to locate an old one, either of these is a good place to start.
- The American Medical Association, mainly a source of information for physicians, makes consumer-related information available at its Health Insight site.
- The Good Health Web offers lotsa links.
- The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services offers HealthFinder, a search engine for health information on the Net.
- Healthtouch brings together information from various groups with specific areas of interest; the site also offers information on drugs and references to local pharmacies across the U.S.
- HealthAnswers, from the Orbis broadcasting company, features information from the American Academy of Family Physicians, American Academy of Pediatrics, U.S. Pharmacopeia, Medline, National Health Council and Spry Foundation and shares "Healthy Living" information with McCall's and Family Circle.
- Family Health is produced by Family Internet, a company in South Nyack, NY.
- Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara
Kaiser was America's first HMO, established in the early '70s (late '60s?). Still ahead of the curve, Kaiser offers Medical Advice, the Kaiser Health Reference and more Health Education topics for its members and for the rest of us.
(A little soapboxing: Health-maintenance organizations began on the West Coast, when actuaries noticed that it costs less to maintain people's health over the long term, avoiding big problems, than to ignore health until something bad happens. So it makes sense, for example, to pay for people to go to the doctor even if it turns out they're not sick. And it's a wise idea to have a G.P. looking after someone's general health, coordinating care from a variety of specialists, rather than expecting a patient to sort out the specialists alone.
(A pleasant upside of all this is that quality of life goes up for the patient as a result of the same function that drives cost down: It's cheaper to be healthy, and it's more fun.
(But this big push from East Coast insurance companies over the past few years to slash costs by forcing everyone into HMOs may mark the death of such coverage. Bottom-line driven plans designed to contain costs, rather than maintain health, defeat the purpose of insurance. They don't keep people healthy, and they don't heal people who become sick. Instead of charging a gatekeeper with the health of his or her patients, insurance companies pay premiums to physicians who discourage clients from seeking further treatment -- often to the long-term detriment of the patients' health.
(By being too greedy, the people who run these plans ruin people's lives by refusing appropriate care, and in the end they cost us more to boot, because they forget the principle that it's cheaper and more effective to nip problems in the bud -- not to mention more considerate. Perhaps on a quarterly basis such tactics will placate shareholders, but the companies who dodge costs this way should not have the words health or care attached to them in any way, and there will be no mourning if their mismanagement of their customers' health drives the companies bankrupt.
(End of sermon. Disagree at will.)
- Columbia Healthcare Corporation offers a variety of consumer health information.
- The American Council on Science and Health is a not-for-profit organization that tries to dig out solid scientific information on controversial topics that affect consumers directly. The ACSH is not shy about taking stands.
- Don't miss the basic Yahoo health area.
The Medical Establishment
Start with where it begins: The Hippocratic Oath.
Then move on to U.S. government sites:
And medical organizations:
Then some other stuff with doctors in mind:
Special Interests
A lot of the links here are to fairly general sources of information on wellbeing. You may be after knowledge on a more specific topic. Below are links to sites that specialize in one health problem or another:
- The Body: A Multimedia AIDS and HIV Information Resource
News, art, medical information, prevention, humor, diet, drugs and more, including a memorial area and a place to post your own story.
- For cancer, there are a wide variety of resources available. Starting at the top:
- American Heart Association
- ChronicIllnet
Resources, news, journals and research on illnesses that are chronic rather than acute: cancer, heart disease, chronic fatigue, Gulf War syndrome, AIDS, neurological diseases and more. Sponsored by Calypte, a biomedical research company.
- Alternative Medicine Homepage
(Alternative medicine isn't really a specialty; it's used to treat problems across the whole medical spectrum. Cutting in a different direction, though, you could say the wide range of practices lumped under the rubric of "nontraditional" represent a special approach to medicine.)
- Fatigue Countermeasures Program
Wondering how to perform when you feel so tired? Take a look at this research coordinated by NASA. It turns out space travel has brought us more than Tang and Velcro.
Women's Sports
If you want to stay healthy, it pays to be fit. Yes, that means get up out of the chair, disconnect the modem, go outside and get some fresh air. If you're not ready for that huge step yet, here are some clues in the meantime (again, targeted at American Health's approximate audience):
Other Health Stuff
Not all of this is easy to categorize:
You'll have to do a bit of digging (and you need to pay), but if you go to this site you can find articles from American Health. As noted at the top of this page, the official (and free) site is at www.americanhealth.com.
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