[INTERNET AIDS FOR THE GASTROENTEROLOGIST]

The medical Internet is growing in paralell with the online information explotion. The aim of this study is to identify the online resources available to gastroenterologists, both in English and Spanish on the Internet.We searched the internet using the following resources: general and medical search engines, biomedical databases, books and listservs.We included for analisis the websites that fulfilled the following criteria: content, autorship, attribution, currency and disclosure.We identified 46 websites in Spanish and 104 in English that met the inclussion criteria. We further categorized these sites into six categories: digestive diseases search resources, professionals organizations, academic department sites, sites with focused areas of interest to gastroenterologists, on line journals and discussion groups (listservs).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. The Internet represents a useful source of information of increasing utility for daily gastroenterologic practice.