Human cloning, anthrax and other medical issues are at the forefront of the news right now, and the decision of whether or not to get a flu shot must be faced. Confused? WebMD and OMNI are two excellent medical search engines that can help you find understandable, reputable information about these and other health-related subjects.
WebMD - AN EXCELLENT, COMPREHENSIVE MEDICAL SEARCH ENGINE FOR CONSUMERS
WebMD is one of the best all-around consumer medical search engines. It contains information about an extensive range of subjects approached from many orientations (e.g. news, informational articles and reports, transcripts of interviews and chats, and shopping sites with relevant products). Many of the reports contained in WebMD are written by its own journalists and reviewed by board-certified physicians.
There are a wide variety of special features and sections on WebMD. For example, there are special sections on 65 of the most common diseases and conditions, with information on symptoms, diagnosis and treatment, etc. There's a very useful drug and herb database which provides information for consumers (e.g. usage, warnings, side effects, dosage) about hundreds of drugs. In addition there are also links to lists of clinical trials (research) being done on specific diseases and newly approved drugs to treat various conditions.
Search Tips
WebMD is not the place to do highly detailed searches. No search operators are available. You can search using any number of keywords.
Results
Search results are divided into four categories - Library (articles and reports), News, Boards and Chat, and Shopping.
Each result contains the title, a description of the document, and its source (e.g. Web MD, ADAM encyclopedia, etc.). After every result you can select the link to related documents to obtain a list of documents similar to that item.
OMNI - FOR HIGH QUALITY HEALTH AND MEDICAL WEBSITES
OMNI calls itself the "United Kingdom's gateway to high quality Internet resources in health and medicine," and it lives up to this description. It was created by the University of Nottingham Greenfield Medical Library, in partnership with organizations in the UK and beyond. Although its database is heavily weighted toward UK sites, many of the sites stem from the United States and other English-speaking countries.
While OMNI is aimed at students, researchers, academics, and medical practitioners, the sites retrieved by most searches can be understood and used by the general public.
OMNI is one of the BIOME group of databases, which also includes VetGate (animal health), BioResearch (biological research), Natural Selection (resources relating to the natural world) and Agrifor (resources in agriculture, food and forestry). You can search any or all of these databases.
OMNI is especially useful for finding reputable sites (e.g. government agencies, nonprofit organizations, journal articles, research projects, etc.) that can be used to get an overview of a subject. In a search that I did entering the keyword cloning some of the eight documents I retrieved were from the sites of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania (US), Human Genetics Advisory Commission (UK), AIDS reagent project (UK), and the Society, Religion and Technology Project (Scotland).
Search Tips
In OMNI's Simple Search mode, you can use quotation marks to indicate a phrase and the Boolean operators AND and OR .
The Advanced Search mode allows you to choose additional search parameters and lets you specify how you want your results to appear on the page. For example, there are menu choices for searching only specific types of resources (e.g. reports, position statements, news services, etc.). And you can select use truncation, in order to search for other endings of your search words (e.g., the search word invest will retrieve investment, investor, investing, etc.)
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