e-medicine

Anyone who has done a Google search for a particular medical topic recently will probably have found a review article from e-Medicine close to the top of the ranked list.

e-Medicine has been operating for seven to eight years and has built up an impressive list of medical review articles which are clearly very popular.

It does not purport to be a web-based "textbook" of medicine as many of the articles are one-off reviews with an overall lack of subject-based continuity.

However this is not necessarily a bad thing, eg, there are articles on tricky topics that never seem to be in the classic texts, such as spinal stenosis.

The individual specialty topics are written in the current "telegraphic" style with lots of bullet points and appropriate brevity, rather than in the somewhat more tedious classic textbook fashion.

Based in New England, e-Medicine claims to have around 10,000 physician authors contributing to their clinical knowledge base, a knowledge base which contains articles on over 6000 diseases and disorders.

e-Medicine also has an evidence based section which is regularly updated (EBM being a perpetually moving ballpark), and boasts an impressive array of practice guidelines for its medical specialties.

There are around 60 medical specialty chapters and sub-chapters, eg, "haematology" has 105 separate topics within the specialty chapter and "gastroenterology" has even more, around 140. Even a "niche" specialty, such as "hand surgery" has some 58 topics within the specialty heading. Some of the topics in this last mentioned section might include otherwise hard-to-find items, such as "trigger finger, nail pathology and ganglions".

The EBM section is code-named "resource centers," which are really EBM-oriented reviews for those ever- changing chameleons, such as atrial arrhythmias, asthma, breast cancer, HRT, DVT, lipids, diabetes and hypertension.

e-Medicine also started up a consumer, service-oriented website link two years ago, called eMedicineHealth

This parallel site is similar to the American Family Physician's well used FamilyDoctor.org site. (New Zealand Doctor, 5 October 2005)

The e-Medicine version has a vast array of around 700 patient handouts and, with such a large editorial base, these are likely to reflect a fairly high quality of information. Importantly, subscription to e-Medicine is free and does not require a North American address or registration number.

Each registration can be personalised, eg with a "family medicine" log-in page. This personal home-page will give up to date summary topics on the latest medical news in that specialty.

For a small additional annual subscription you can access the images, photos and other resources which form an important part of the articles.

There are compact versions of these images within the articles which are quite adequate but the photos and drawings cannot be enlarged without a formal subscription.

An additional, regular subscription cost will enable extended access to the e-Medicine Health Education Center, CME US style! The first 90 minutes are free, presumably referring to logging in time and after that US$7.50 per 90 minutes.
At the time of preparation of this article the PDA section was being updated. It is assumed there will be a number of articles prepared in small screen PDA format which will be able to be downloaded free of charge once the link is up and running again.