Go to the main story.

Go to Web Exploration

Go to Technology Post

There's an embarrassment of riches for those seeking health information on the Internet -- and some fool's gold as well. These days the question isn't "What's online?" -- instead, it's "What's not online?"

The two challenges are figuring out where to start and how to judge what you find.

Following are links to medical journals, health organizations, useful search engines, prominent government and commercial sites and some information on what you'll find in popular online services. Explore a site as far as you like. When you're done, click "Guided Tour" above to continue reading.

Health sites include the most prestigious research journals, such as the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association

That means you can enjoy the irony of reading via the Internet the passage from last week's edition of JAMA stating that "vast chunks" of medical information found on the Internet are "incomplete, misleading or inaccurate."

The nation's leading health organizations can also be found online. Groups such as the American Cancer Society provide a range of health information and news about cancer therapies.

Private individuals also maintain sites about their interests -- and some can be awesomely complete. Online psychologist John Grohol's "Psych Central" site is a definitive online listing of all Web sites, mailing lists, newsgroups and support information for online mental health.

The World Wide Web allows designers of sites to link their sites to others of common interest. The links are usually highlighted onscreen, and so visitors to one Web location can find references to another and with a click of a mouse visit the cited site. These many connections are the "Web" part of the World Wide Web, all interconnected in a dazzlingly intricate structure. Like a spider web, it also goes in circles; wandering from link to link can be exhausting and repetitive.

That's where search engines come in. These sites help make sense of the vast complexity of the World Wide Web. Altavista, Infoseek and others monitor millions of pages on the Web and allow users to search for information by typing in keywords. Other sites like Yahoo! create super-indexes of the World Wide Web and make it relatively easy to "drill down" through categories to get to the information you need. Thus from the opening Yahoo! screen, a user can click on the "health" category to reach subtopics on everything from alternative medicine (with 380 current sub-subtopics) to nearly 3,000 sub-sub-topics on "Diseases and Conditions."

We've assembled a special Web Expedition for those who want to know more about popular search engines.

The difficulty in finding the needle of information in that haystack is part of the impetus for the government's Healthfinder site. It contains links to some 500 online documents and more than 550 sites on the World Wide Web, including more than 200 federal sites and 350 drawn from the best of state, local, nonprofit and other information sources. Users can find medical news, information about new studies and medications, lists of frequently asked questions (FAQs) on many topics, and much more. Most important, this huge trove of health information is organized for easy searching, so that users don't get as easily swamped by the glut of information available.

Along with the government's official site, there are a number of for-profit companies offering medical information via the Internet. One, Mediconsult.com, calls itself "virtual medical clinic" and provides information from government and medical research sources, as well as online discussion and support groups. Those groups are moderated, which means that someone is watching to ensure that the information given out online is accurate and the tone civil. Access to the site is free, and the company supports itself through book and product sales, a for-pay "select a specialist" service and commercial sponsorship.

Another popular commercial site, Healthgate, offers a mix of for-pay and free services to consumers seeking health information. (Note: If you visit this site, click your browser's "Back" button to return to this guide).

Many denizens of online health research say that finding data is only part of the value the Internet offers. Once people get their initial information from online libraries, they spend time in discussions with other patients who might be able to deliver insight into coping with particular diseases. Online services such as America Online, Compuserve, Microsoft Network and Prodigy also feature such discussion groups. Since each of the major online services offers several free hours to newcomers so that they can check out the offerings and kick the virtual tires, it's relatively straightforward to tour cyberspace in search of the information and forum that best suits your needs. The discussions can be freewheeling, and not all of the information that you pick up -- especially in unmoderated forums -- may be reliable. But their supporters swear by them.

Such discussions are surprisingly easy to find. Online services such as Dejanews (www.dejanews.com) allow users to search for online discussions among the thousands of topics on the Usenet with the same kinds of keyword searches that get you Web sites on Altavista and Infoseek.