The Web: Patients heal themselves online - UPI.com

"More than 1 million visitors per day are logging on to the Web pages run by the National Library of Medicine, Dr. Donald Lindberg, the library's director, told UPI. "It's close to a billion a year," he added. "A good, heavy part of that are consumers."...

The NLM -- part of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. -- is the world's largest medical library. It recently launched a new program, called InfoRX, to make its medical databases more easily accessible for consumers, and lead them to reliable health information, not information that may be shaded by a drug company's perspective.

"InfoRX rests on a considerable amount of previous work," Lindberg said.

For years, the NLM has operated a service called Medline, which provides doctors with access to summaries of the latest medical research. The library also offers MedlinePlus for consumers...."