Entry bubble Finding Information About Illnesses and Other Ailments Online

By: Jake | December 03, 2007 | Category: Health

My brother recently did a two week stint in the hospital because he had pancreatitis. He’s fine now, but it was quite a scare.

If you are like most of the people I have talked to (that aren’t doctors or nurses), you probably have never heard of pancreatitis. When I found out my brother had it I scoured the Internet to find out everything I could about it. I found two really good websites that provided insight on the ailment and ways to prevent future cases.

MedlinePlus has information on 740 different diseases and ailments and it is where I found the Pancreatitis link above. This is no surprise since MedlinePlus is maintained by the world’s largest medical health library, the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

I found out at MedlinePlus that there are two forms of pancreatitis, acute and chronic, and it can be triggered by alcoholism and diabetes. My brother had acute pancreatitis and his doctors said his pancreatitis was caused by diabetes, which he was unaware he had.

I know a lot about diabetes since I read Sam’s recent blog post. Still I was able to find more information about diabetes using HealthFinder.gov, a partnership of many federal agencies maintained by the Department of Health and Human Services. HealthFinder.gov focuses more on prevention than MedlinePlus and links to carefully selected information and Web sites from over 1,500 health-related organizations.

While the internet is not the only way to find health information, these two sites can cover a lot of ground for you. And as always the best health expert is your doctor.

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