Pathology, Internal Medicine, and the World Health
Organization
This week I used
someone else's bookmark to find my material. I was
curious to see what others had bookmarked (I was on a school computer),
so I went there and found a bookmark on "Pathology, nephrology, medicine
homepage", so I tried it out. Here I found the Department of
Lab
Medicine and Pathology for the University of Alberta. Listed underneath
were the major subheadings: Information About the Department of
Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, Personnel, Divisions of Laboratory
Medicine and Pathology, Academic, and Resources. I went to resources and
found mostly links to information about AIDS. However, there was one
link at the very end to "various resources", which incuded a selection of
pathological
images such as adenocarcinoma of the colon, a brain stem hemorrhage,
a goiter, a cross-section of a heart and lung, macrophages, and much much more. For anyone interested in histology or just curious to see what these things look like inside of you, I highly recommend checking this page out. This section was great becaus
e it was concise. It merely listed the various photographs and links to them without some verbose statement about what the photograph was. When I clicked for the photographs, it did not take very long for my computer to connect to the host computer, so
there wasn't a lot of waiting around time. Most importantly, unlike some other links I have gone to, you get to see what you expect to see -- a picture of some bodily tissue.
Next, I went
back to the original
homepage, but this time I went under "Academic" and clicked on the Internal
Medicine PBL Course. On this
page, were the major topics of Course Objectives, and two major areas of
problems -- Cardiovascular
Pathology,
which discusses diseases of the heart and systemic circulation, and Respiratory Tract
Pathology. I
only clicked on the former, and this led me to a listing of various topic areas -- such as arteriosclerosis, hupertension, and heart failure -- which are covered in the course. I clicked on hypertension and found the actual course material. This was ver
y exciting to me, to find an actual course on such topics. After reading through the material, I realized that this was geared toward doctors actually practicing medicine. The language was scientific, and even though I have a fairly strong science backg
round, I sometimes found myself getting lost. This link is not for the layman. However, I love the idea of doctors being able to log on to a computer to access the information they need to diagnose and treat a patient. My only complaint about this part
icular file was that it was way too incomplete. There were only two
major topic areas, when in actuality there are seven major systems in the
body, and tons of subtopics within each system. I don't know if this already exists, but I would love to see a homepage on recent medical findings that would help doctors to keep on top of the dynamic field of medicine. Socially, this would be beneficia
l to everyone because the doctor would be able to most accurately and efficiently prescribe the best regimen of treatment, and patients would receive the best care possible. .
My last finding for
this week was a major gem. Again, I looked under
the bookmarks, but this time I went to World
Health Organization. There were many subtopics listed on this
homepage, such as Ebola Virus Outbreak, World Health Day and No-Tobacco
Day, and Statistical Information, but what I found most exciting was the
links to other servers. There were links to Gopher, CUI, Yahoo,
InfoSeek, WebCrawler, and Search Engines, all of which, would allow one
to conduct further searches. However, since my major topic of interest
is Health Related Internet, the link to Health-related Web
Servers -- was most
exciting to me. This link is the ultimate if you're looking for anything
related to health. I chose to look under Med Nexus, the purpose of
which, was to provide organized links which can assist physicians/the medical community in their exploration. Under Med-line, I went to Medical Sites By Category: Medical Schools, Govement Links, Medical Organizations, On-Line Journal, Patient informati
on, and Diseases. I only had a chance to look under Medical
Schools, and there were links several medical school
s' homepages, and these homepages dealt with anything from describing the medical school's admissions and curriculum, to social event for the students. If you are looking for information about a particular medical school, this page is for you! .
Socially, I think
that resources such as this are important because
rather than having to write to the medical school for information, one can merely look up the information on the internet. This cuts down waiting time for the student, and saves the med
ical school a lot on postage, but most importantly, it saves our trees from being cut down and made into these catalogs. If we can get all the medical schools on the internet and minimize the need for paper, we could save that many trees every year. In
fact, take that a step further, what if all our classes were like this one where, instead of turning in actual papers, we turned in computer diskettes or sent our homework to our professors via the internet; we would cut down on so much needless paper was
tage and perhaps our trees would have a chance to replenish and proper, and maybe we would not be in this environmental mess that we are currently in. Well, that's my social consciousness tirade for the week. I'm outta here!
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