I have heard it said that the informed patient is a growing problem in medicine. This book will ensure that the problem increases. The new edition covers 600 books, 130 popular health magazines, 1,400 pamphlets, 44 health information clearinghouses, 200 toll‐free lines, 278 health resource and referral organisations, 45 online services, 139 selected Web sites and 48 supportive professional texts and journals. For every item there is an evaluative note and the best ones are awarded up to three stars. There are chapters on medical consumerism, best sources, and clearinghouses’ hotlines and search services. The various formats get a chapter each. The one on the Internet draws attention to medically reliable sites, and to pages that produce evaluative critiques of other sites. The last two chapters, which make up about half the book, deal with health books and health pamphlets by disease. There are author, title and subject indexes.
This source book is produced primarily for the United States market, and so some of the information, like helplines, will not be of much use to the non‐American reader. Other parts, like the Web sites, will be of worldwide use. The lists of texts and magazines probably fall somewhere in between. The introductory chapter and the opening discussion of the other chapters are worth reading to get to grips with this area of medical literature. Even the helplines may be of use to forge international links between patient support groups. Consumer Health Information Source Book deserves to sell well in the USA. Outside the United States major medical libraries and public reference libraries can probably get enough out of it to justify the cost. Medical charities and patient support groups should encourage their local reference library to buy it.
