MEDICAL EXPERTS' TALES NOT FOR THIN-SKINNED : WEBPOINTERS.

Byline: Kitty Williams

Do you remember the girl in high school who had perfect skin? Never a spot? And she said all she ever used on her face was soap and water?

And the other one who was a martyr to virulent acne and had to take prescription medicine that didn't really help that much?

The girl with the perfect skin was probably captain of the basketball team and class president. The girl with acne probably kept her shoulders slightly hunched and seemed awkward and shy around others.

Your skin has a lot to do with how people perceive you. Nowhere is this exploited more than in the movies. Dermatologist Vail Reese's award-winning Web site, Dermatology in the Cinema, shines a spotlight on the ways in which skin conditions, from rosacea to sun damage to tattoos, are used in the cinema to symbolize a character's personality and morality.

Winner of the Best Web Site award in the 1996 AMA Medical Film Competition, Reese's site isn't heavy-handed at all. He uses the simple facts - photographs of actors showing their real or fictional skin conditions with a brief description of the character they portray - to indicate how the cinema takes advantage of our tendency to judge one another on the basis of appearances.

There are many lessons and resources at this site, but they are offered with a light, entertaining touch.

Movie enthusiasts will enjoy background information about the actors and movies they love, Web surfers will like the well-designed Web site, and those who struggle with skin conditions can find links to dermatology patient support groups.

There is more than one cautionary tale embedded in this entertaining site. The category, Representations of Evil, points out how often movies use skin conditions to signal that a character is evil.

Parents whose children forget to use sunscreen will find the Dick Tracy villain Pruneface a useful visual aid when pointing out what sun damage can do to a person's good looks.

Before and after photographs of Brigitte Bardot and Robert Redford, also victims of sun damage, are shown in the section on Actors with Skin Findings. Other skin conditions in this section include W.C. Field's rosacea, which gave him his bulbous nose, actor Morgan Freeman's DPNs, the little dark bumps on his cheeks common among African-Americans, and traction alopecia or hair loss from too-tight corn-row braids worn by actors such as Whoopi Goldberg and Bo Derek.

Granted this is a well-designed site with great graphics and useful information, but surely, you think, it can't have had much competition for the AMA's best medical Web site award!

Well, just a short browse with the help of your favorite search engine will show you that you may be wrong to assume that. Complicated medical Web sites are out there in abundance, all demanding attention.

There's the University of Iowa's Virtual Hospital: the Apprentice's Assistant, for example. Presented by the University Department of Radiology's Electric Differential Multimedia Laboratory, the site has multimedia information for both patients and health care providers, as well as links to other Internet health-related sites.

Then there's the AMA's own Official Home Page with links to AMA Health Insight, a guide to health resources on the Internet, and AMA Physician Select, with a database of 650,000 doctors licensed to practice in the United States where you can find a doctor by name, specialty or location anywhere in the country.

If you want further proof of the number of medical sites on the Internet, glance at Martindale's Health Science Guide '96.

'Nuff said.

ADDRESS BOOK

Dermatology in the Cinema

http://itsa.ucsf.edu/(tilde)vcr/Dermcin.html

Representations of Evil

http://itsa.ucsf.edu/(tilde)vcr/Evil.html

Actors with Skin Findings

http://itsa.ucsf.edu/(tilde)vcr/Actors.html

The Virtual Hospital

http://vh.radiology.uiowa.edu/

AMA Home Page

http://www.ama-assn.org/

Martindales' Health Science Guide '96

http://www-sci.lib.uci.edu/HSG/HSGuide.html

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