www.medicalstudent.com

Rating: ***

I have always liked websites that gather lots of information in one place because they often make searching the internet more effective and less time consuming. www.medicalstudent.com is such a website.

The site introduces itself as “a digital library of authoritative medical information for all students of medicine.” It offers a starting point for medical resources on the world wide web by selecting representative websites, from scientific ones to the less academic. All the sites are selected by a process of peer review. The home page lacks images and is constructed as a structured list, divided in sections, each containing links to the selected websites.

The medical textbook section is organised according to medical specialties, ranging from gynaecology to evidence based medicine and from pathology to travel medicine. Do not expect to find all the specialties, but you will find most. The manuals you can access from here are not comprehensive, but they are useful in structuring and clarifying the information you get in lectures at university and deserve credit for being online and free of charge. Apart from manuals, this section includes catalogues with useful images at hand. It will spare you some searches in the library to find what that skin lesion or that eye condition looks like.

The website also has a Medical Journal section and a Medical Organizations section, gathering links to many main journals and organisations, respectively, which are thought to be of interest to students. Dont overlook the Patient Education / Consumer Health Information section. You might want to direct a patient to some of the links here, or even have a look yourself (we all are consumers and patients at some point). If its online medical dictionaries, Internet directories or search engines that you want to find, this website provides you with some options for this as well.

As medical students, we put a lot of time and effort searching for information, be it on the internet or in the libraries. This website that acts as a portal, by offering a wide range of information to which you can direct yourself, should be a good and resourceful tool.