Medical webwatch.

Sleep Disorders Information (www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/prof/sleep/index.htm) from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute website offers sections on sleep apnea, restless leg syndrome, insomnia, with the information available as PDFs. A series of reports in the "Sleep in Youth" section addresses the serious consequences of falling asleep at the wheel and is aimed especially at younger drivers. There is also a link to the National Sleep Disorders Research Plan. This succinct section of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute offers an insight into what may be for some an obscure, if sleepless, comer of medicine.

National Organization of Rare Disorders (NORD) (http://www.rarediseases.org/search/rdblist.html) will open an alphabetical listing of reference guides to rare diseases. NORD describes the classification of a rare disease: "... a rare or 'orphan' disease affects fewer than 200,000 people in the United States. There are more than 6,000 rare disorders that, taken together, affect approximately 25 million Americans. One in every 10 individuals in this country has received a diagnosis of a rare disease." The entries are supplied in the form of brief summaries with links for further information. The descriptions on NORDs rare disease database are written by medical writers and reviewed by physicians. Although these reports are succinct introductions they are accompanied by links to health service agencies for further enlightenment. This website is an excellent entry point for quick facts about rare conditions.

Atlas of Diseases of the Kidney (http://www.kidneyatlas.org) Segregated in the "Contents" are five volumes of a textbook edited by Professor Robert W. Schrier, Department of Medicine, University of Colorado. Each chapter opens as a PDF offering attractive font styles and pristine illustrative figures. This format also allows quick enlargement of images and selection of optimal font size toggled at the reader's discretion. All the images in the book are available directly via the "High Resolution Images" section. PowerPoint presentations are also available, and although some of the download times may be protracted, it is well worth the wait, for this is a very useful facility. The structure of the book starts with "Disorders of Water, Electrolytes and Acid-base," and progresses through "Acute Renal Failure," "Glomerulonephritis and Vasculitis," "Tubular Interstitial Disease," "Hypertension and Hypertensive Nephropathy," "Co-morbidity," "Dialysis," and finally "Transplantation." This well structured discourse is a tour de force.

The First Course in Pharmacokinetics and Biopharmaceutics by David Bourne, Professor of Pharmacy, University of Oklahoma (http://www.boomer.org/c/p1/index.html) is a no-frills dissertation that is densely packed with the formulae that are an inescapable component of pharmacokinetics. This well structured discourse doesn't skip these mathematical formulations--and although it is well illustrated with graphs, tables, and line drawings, etc--it offers no pretty cartoons or such "eye candy" by way of a respite. However, the website is extremely easy to navigate with simple forward and back arrows helpfully positioned both at the top and bottom of the pages with an index always available for revision. Whether you will find this a dry dissertation or a lucrative resource will depend on the rate at which the data partitions between these pages and your cerebral corpus, which will in turn correlate directly to your interest in pharmacokinetics. But remember that this information may be prescribed either as a bolus or via slow infusion.

Dermatology for Students (http://matrix.ucdavis.edu/tumors.html) is authored by Art Huntley, Professor of Dermatology at University of California Davis. This interesting site opens with an introduction to diseases of the skin. Although this chapter is illustrated with line drawings, the tutorial soon moves on to more focused chapters covering common infections of the skin both viral and bacterial, and these are well illustrated with photographs. The chapters are: "Introduction to Diseases of the Skin," "Common Bacterial Infections," "Common Viral Infections," "Fever and Rash Diagnosis of the Dangerously Ill Patient," "Eczematous Diseases," "Benign Tumors," "Skin Tumor Atlas" (subdivided into the lavishly illustrated subcategories of "Basal Cell" and "Squamous Cell Carcinomas"), and finally a "Melanoma Tutorial," which has a sequence of 9 diagnostic rules that promises: "You can be an expert at diagnosing a melanoma." This website is a simple yet effective tutorial that is especially suitable for students.

Nobelprize.org (http://nobelprize.org/medicine/laureates/index.html) is a fascinating chronology of Nobel Laureates in physiology or medicine, and dates from the beginning of the 20th century through to the present day. These biographies open under the headings "Press Release," "Presentation Speech," and "Illustrated Presentation." The more recent entries use audio/visual methods with the earlier discourses offered as PDF. Also included are the laureate's "Nobel Lectures," "Curriculum Vitae," "Interviews," and as a lighter contrast, their "Banquet Speeches." The top menu bar carries Nobel Prize winners in various other disciplines which are just as enthralling. Some of the more recent entries have an educational page that elucidates their subject. This is surely the apotheosis of the value of knowledge to the human condition.

E-mail: [e-mail] with your favorite web sites