Permanence is not the Internet's long suit, therefore the test of any worthwhile book on that topic, beyond content, is whether the general advice and recommendations hold up long after the uniform resource locators (URLs) mutate or disappear. Howard and Judi Wolinsky's Healthcare Online for Dummies: A Reference for the Rest of Us! does just that!
The strength of this book is the authors' enthusiasm and expertise in the hunt for “comprehensive and reliable information on a deadline.” Judi Wolinsky is a professional librarian, head of reference services and Web manager for a public library. Howard Wolinsky is an experienced, award-winning journalist, who has covered health care for many years for one of Chicago's top newspapers.
Written as a reference for consumers who want to be active participants in their own health care, this book is as reliable as a book about the Internet can be, given the moving target of the subject matter. Especially useful is the authors' inclusion of some of the “secret” ways to get information about doctors, hospitals, drugs, health insurance, and the most common chronic diseases. While this type of information is very familiar to medical librarians, even the existence of such resources is generally a mystery to lay persons.
The book is organized into seven major themes and twenty-one chapters. The book has basic guidance for those in need, such as the suggestion to refer to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Website for verification of current health-related rumors under discussion. The Wolinskys also highlight notable “megasites.” Librarians and the National Library of Medicine (NLM) will be pleased to see that MEDLINEplus is covered early in the book, as are the Medical Library Association's ten most useful sites.
Consumers will find the section “Researching a Disease Step-by-Step” of particular interest. It provides an abundance of useful sites. Librarians may be complacent about access (paid for by library budgets) to the latest information about diseases and drugs and the latest medical research. Consumers, however, often have no access to a medical library and the numerous online and print resources. The authors have found good, free Internet sites that are accessible to the public. This reviewer is puzzled, however, why they steer searchers first to Internet Grateful Med (IGM) before covering MEDLINEplus. The latter site, although relatively new at the time of writing, even then contained many disease-related topics.
The section on hospitals provides useful resources, including the American Hospital Association (AHA) and Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) sites. It also recommends several commercial sites (http://www.hospitalselect.com) and (http://www.healthgrades.com). Unfortunately, the authors do not give even a brief description of how these site collect information and why it is valuable. This description would have added immensely to the volume.
In fact, the lack of information about the sites themselves, the sponsors, and potential biases, all the issues the Health On the Net (HON) Foundation lists in its code, comprises the major weakness of this book. To do the authors justice, they do discuss HON at the beginning of the book and include the code as well. Given the standard format of the Dummies series—brevity, levity, and use of many pictures—pressures on the authors to keep the amount of information about each source to the essential was probably extreme, and the merits of the publishers' goals can be argued. However, the fact that a professional librarian and an experienced journalist together have written the Internet book likely to reach the largest consumer audience at least means consumers are being steered to reliable, stable sites. It then falls on readers to investigate sites and apply the HON code principles while doing research.
Some unfortunate evolutions and disappearances of sites have happened since the book was written. For example, the authors present Dr. Koop's Website as one of their recommended megasites. That was before ads took over the site's default page. The site may still be useful, but now the onus is on readers to question who supports the site and to identify any potential biases. Perhaps a better choice would have been New York Online Access to Health (NOAH), a comprehensive site developed under a federal grant in 1995. As a joint library development, NOAH is likely to be more stable than a commercial site. NOAH is also a bilingual site, with information in Spanish and English. Instead, the authors chose to include NOAH in their discussion of alternative medicine, heart disease, and men's and women's health.
Drugs are a major topic of interest to consumers. This reviewer therefore was disappointed to see the first site chosen in the chapter on diseases, CBSHealthWatch, has disappeared. In the chapter, “Researching and Buying Medicines,” the authors again recommend the Dr. Koop Website, this time for drug information. When this review was written, the Drug Checker would not display. In any case, the MEDLINEplus Drug Information from the U.S. Pharmacopeia is now clearly the free drug site of choice for consumers. The authors do include it as well as the free PDR site, although the URL has changed.
Despite these minor points and issues regarding lack of depth, this book contains a wonderful selection of health information sites for consumers of all ages and both genders who want to look for information on the Internet. One of the best sections is the central list printed on bright yellow paper, which makes it easily accessible, of over 400 useful health-related sites by category.