In my last column I reviewed some of the online medical databases run by various government agencies and universities that you can use to find statistics on health care issues.

In this column I'll take a look at the other health information available on the Internet, including databases of physicians and hospitals, online medical reference books, medical research journals and studies and search engines for finding other health resources.

While all the Web sites I'm describing here are free, many require that you register to gain access.

  Doctors

The American Medical Association has a Doctor Finder' database you can use to locate a physician and find out his or her medical background.

At that page click on 'Search by name or medical specialty,' then click on 'Accept' at the disclaimer page. At the next screen, select 'Physician Name.'

You'll get a page with a search box into which you can type the name and state of a doctor. At the results page you'll see listed the physician's office address and phone number, medical school, residency training and medical specialty.

Many state medical boards have similar databases of licensed physicians, some of which include disciplinary actions and malpractice judgments.

One of those is at the California Medical Board's Web site at http://www.docboard.org/ca/df/casearch.htm

To see what's available in other states, try the 'DocFinder' service of the Administrators in Medicine/Association of State Medical Board Executive Directors.

At that page you'll find links to online medical association databases for 16 states.

  Hospitals

The American Medical Association Web site also allows you to search for a hospital in the United States. That feature, called 'Hospital Select,' is at http://www.hospitalselect.com.

At that page click on 'Search,' and then at the disclaimer page, click on 'Accept.' At the next screen you can type the name, city and state of a hospital into the search boxes.

Your search will retrieve the address, phone number and chief executive officer of the hospital, summary data on the total number of admissions, emergency room visits and surgeries, as well as the types of care provided at the hospital.

Another Web site, the American Hospital Directory, has even more information on hospitals.

There you can type in the name of a hospital and find out the number of beds available, revenue and net income, number of Medicare patients and average charges per visit.

The directory is operated by Quadramed Corp., a private health care information company, but the statistics at the site are drawn primarily from government Medicare data.

If you want to find out if a hospital has its own Web page, try the HospitalWeb site at http://neuro-www2.mgh.harvard.edu/hospitalwebusa.html.

There you'll see alphabetical listings of hospital Web sites in each state.

  Medical References

To find the definition of a medical term, try the American Medical Association's online glossary.

Another medical dictionary is available at the MedicineNet Web page.

At that page, click on 'Medical Dictionary' on the left.

A third online medical dictionary is available at the CancerWeb site in Great Britain. That address is http://www.graylab.ac.uk/omd/index.html.

Besides the dictionaries, a few other popular medical reference works are now online.

The Merck Manual of Geriatrics, a standard reference on the medical problems of the elderly, is available at http://www.merck.com/pubs/mm_geriatrics/toc.htm.

Unfortunately there's no search engine for the manual, but you can use your browser's 'Find' feature to quickly scan the detailed table of contents.

The Merck Corp. also has put online some sections of its Merck Manual of Medical Information Home Edition. The available portions are on the heart, the eye, infections and women's health issues. That manual is at http://www.merck.com/pubs/mmanual_home/content.htm.

Yet another Merck publication, The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, is expected to be up at the site later in 1999, when a new edition is released.

For information on prescription drugs, the Philadelphia Daily News and Inquirer Web site has a searchable database of pharmaceutical products, provided by U.S. Pharmacopeia, a non-profit health care information group.

The information includes a description of each drug, the different brand names under which it is sold, proper dosages and potential side effects.

  Medical Research

MEDLINE, the National Library of Medicine's massive bibliographic database of medical research and publications, is available online at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed.

MEDLINE has abstracts of 9 million documents dating to 1966, including articles in more than 3,900 medical related journals. At the Internet site you can do a keyword search to locate abstracts of research on a particular medical topic.

Besides the summaries of the research findings, the abstracts also list the names of the researchers who wrote the papers and are working on particular health issues.

The nation's two premier medical journals -- The Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine -- are also both available on the Internet.

JAMA, which has a searchable database of nearly four years of back issues, is at http://www.ama-assn.org/public/journals/jama/jamahome.htm.

The New England Journal of Medicine has an archive of issues back to 1990, searchable by keyword. That's at http://www.nejm.org.

  Other Health Information

For more general health information, the main federal government site is the National Institutes of Health Web page.

Under the umbrella of the NIH are 25 different institutes and centers, and it can be difficult to figure out where to go on the Web site for information on a particular topic.

Fortunately the NIH has a Health Information Index, an alphabetical listing of medical topics that links you to the institute or research center working in each area.

You also can try the general NIH search engine.

To locate consumer information on a health topic, along with a list of links to organizations working on that issue, try the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service's Healthfinder site. That's at http://www.healthfinder.gov.

Just type the name of the topic into the search box to get the list of related government publications and Web sites.

One other major health-related federal agency is the Food and Drug Administration. That's at http://www.fda.gov.

Among the features at the FDA site is a searchable database of drugs approved by the agency.

And there's a search engine for finding FDA reports on food and nutrition issues.

Besides the government sites, there are a number of private organizations that have put up Web pages on particular health topics.

For cancer information, you can go to OncoLink at http://www.oncolink.upenn.edu.

Run by the University of Pennsylvania Cancer Center, it has detailed information on the diagnosis and treatment of all forms of cancer.

For documents related to the dangers of smoking, check the Tobacco Control Archives at the University of California, San Francisco. That's at http://www.library.ucsf.edu/tobacco.

There you'll find electronic versions of documents filed in various court cases against the tobacco companies.

The UCSF site also has a good topical index of general health resources on the Internet.

Each Web site listed in the index is annotated with a description of what's available, the group sponsoring it and how frequently it is updated.

Another good index of Internet medical resources is HealthWeb, set up by a group of health science librarians in the Midwest. HealthWeb, which has both a subject guide and a search engine, is at http://healthweb.org.

For a still broader index, you can try Medical Word Search, a private Internet site that has a database of nearly 100,000 selected health Web pages searchable by keyword. The search engine also has a built in medical thesaurus that automatically includes terms similar to the keywords you choose.

Similar search engines that specialize in medical resources on the Internet are: The Health on the Net Foundation at http://www.hon.ch; MedSite at http://www.medsite.com; Medical Matrix at http://www.medmatrix.org; HealthAtoZ at http://www.HealthAtoZ.com; There are many other health sites on the Internet. But ferreting out those that are authoritative and reliable from the ones that are spurious or self-serving can be a difficult task.

To guide you through the maze, the Michigan Electronic Library has assembled a collection of articles that evaluate the medical information available on the Web.

But your best bet is getting hold of a medical expert to help you weigh the information you've found.

One starting point for a reporter is the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Web page, which has a list of phone numbers for press contacts at its various programs.

This list is organized alphabetically by topic, such as AIDS, smoking, substance abuse and women's health. That page is at http://www.hhs.gov/news/press3.html.