Yahoo: Internet sites peddle lousy lice treatments

JAMA has high quality pdf versions of patient information on their website. This issue has a handout onTB testing.

I had questions today about meningococcal vaccination: Meningococcal Disease and Vaccine Information from the Immunization Action Coalition seems to have to most thorough discussion of this topic.

McGraw-Hill publishes several journals that you are likely familair with .. all now with online versions which include full text of most articles:

Healthcare Informatics

Postgraduate Medicine

The Physician and Sportsmedicine Online.

Medscape.com, not to be outdone by WebMD's promotion of free full text access to Scientific American Medicine (limited time – see link below), is now offering Medscape members (free registration) access to Harrison's Online (HOL) through May 8th. It's tough to find on the medscape website .. once you have logged in the to medscape, access Harrison's for free by using this link: http://www.medscape.com/HOL/public/HOL-about.html.
I find the interface to Harrison's to be preferable to SAM, but they both suffer from the "I used to be a textbook" problem: lots of clicking "next" to view to see the next page. With Stat-ref's superior user interface, there is not nearly so much clickety-clicking as one sees in HOL,SAM, or even MDconsult.

At the CDC:
1) Community Indicators of Health-Related Quality of Life — United States, 1993-1997. An interesting look at subjective health indicators rather than so-called "objective" health indicators. No surprises here. The poor, crowded and unemployed feel unhealthy more often than others.

2) CDC website now available en Espaol.

I was e-mailed a fascinating article yesterday: Why Doctors Hate The Net. … it's a discussion of a small study done by Forrester Research. There is very good analysis and discussion of a study of physicians' perceptions of the internet. I didn't link to it above because it's inside of their (subscription) website … You can sign up for 90 days for free, and then you will be able to access the article here.

Some interesting news on the POEMs front. POEMs (Patient Oriented Evidence that Matters) are useful summaries of recent clinical literature. The best resource for learning about poems is the "mother ship:" infopoems.com Back here in Albany, New York, we've been using POEMs to teach 3rd year medical students … having them try their hand at writing POEMs. They are also sharing the POEMs with eath other and their preceptors from the Family Medicine 3rd year clerkship. Take a look at our (gestational) website: www.studentpoems.org. Finally, if you want to carry around your POEMs, Kent Willyard has (with permission) put POEMS to 6/99 into an isilo file for downloading and reading on a palmpilot here.

Statistical Information on Older Persons. Many tidbits here to impress your friends with at the water cooler.

AAFP (American Academy of Family Physicians) members can get the Annual Clinical Focus – ACF 1999: Management and Prevention of the Complications of Diabetes CME on CD-ROM for free if you order by June 1.