Digestive disease resources on the Internet

The aim of this study is to help digestive disease professionals fully utilize the resources available on the Internet for patient care, education, and research. The following search resources were employed to locate websites: general search engines--Lycos, Metacrawler, Webcrawler, and Yahoo!; medical search engines--HealthWeb, MedMatrix, MedWeb, and MedWebPlus; website links; and publications. The inclusion of web sites was based on their content. Each site was evaluated with respect to its authorship, attribution, currency, and disclosure. All digestive disease professional organizations and academic centers that met the above criteria were included. Only nutrition sites with relevance to digestive diseases were included. A variety of very useful web sites related to digestive diseases exist on the Internet, and their numbers are growing. Many of these sites have valuable information that can be used to improve patient care, promote medical education, and facilitate research. Digestive disease professionals should adopt the Internet and address the many issues raised by this technology.