Health Education AIDS Liaison, Toronto
Dictionaries and Journal Indexes On-Line
One Look Dictionaries
This is a great service. You can enter a word like "retrovirus" and One Look will give you all the entries in the 500+ dictionaries they link too. They also have a comprehensive list by specialty of all the dictionaries they have found on line.
The On-line Medical Dictionary
66596 words as of Jul 11 1999. Excellent indexing and cross referencing.
Biotech Life Sciences Dictionary
Currently, most of our 8300+ terms deal with biochemistry, biotechnology,
botany, cell biology and genetics.
Hypermedia Glossary Of Genetic Terms
Big Picture Book of Viruses
Human immunodeficiency virus 1, is in the Retroviridae family. Check out the HIV pictures. Lots of cartoons. The few EM photos are full of cellular debris or tightly cropped to avoid revealing major contaminants in the culture. These sort of images are no better than UFO photos as evidence of what these spherical organelles might be.
Glossary of HIV/AIDS-Related Terms
All the AIDS related jargon and many fairy tales besides. A good quick
reference if you want to know the basics of something like the RYAN
WHITE C.A.R.E. ACT or what the NIAID is and how to reach their web site.
 The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy
Online, searchable version of this standard reference
text. (Keep in mind that it is published by a big pharmaceutical company.)
Journal Indexes
Medline
NLM offers PubMed and Internet Grateful Med, two free systems to search MEDLINE (for a guide to searching MEDLINE go here). They both:
- Provide an easy way to search the 11 million references and abstracts in the MEDLINE database;
- Use PubMed's retrieval engine to link to about 400 journals for full text of articles (some publishers may require a subscription) and provide pre-computed sets of relevant MEDLINE articles;
- Offer NLM's Medical Subject Headings for searching; and
- Use Loansome Doc for document delivery services (there may be local charges).
How
to Read a Paper
By Trisha Greenhalgh British Medical Journal
This is a series of articles introducing non-experts to finding medical articles and
assessing their value. The author reminds us "that some (perhaps most) published articles
belong in the bin, and should certainly not be used to inform practice." Ms.
Greenhalgh is highly critical of drug company "reps" or "detailers"; she offers helpful
advice for deconstructing drug company hype. These articles also function as a glossary
of terminology (surrogate markers; accuracy, specificity, sensitivity and predictive values
of tests; etc) with clear explanations and examples. Sections 6 & 7 are highly
recommended:
Papers
that report drug trials
Papers
that report diagnostic or screening tests
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