It is a good time to be interested in health and medical search. We have seen the recent arrival of Mednar, for example, which is the product of the firm DeepWebTechnologies.

DeepWebTechnologies specializes in the development of specialty search engines. ScienceRoll is a far more modest effort, lacking as it does the email alert features and the greater number of databases and other resources that can be searched on Mednar. But it is edifying to compare and contrast what each renders searchable and they complement one another nicely in that respect.

I was quite impressed with the drug information I was able to find on ScienceRoll. I tried out as my search term Riluzole, the only drug that seems to have any effect in extending survival for those with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and ScienceRoll very helpfully suggested, “Also Consider: Rilutek.”

ScienceRoll provided several interesting, useful results that mentioned Riluzole, if only incidentally. I liked the serendipitous aspect of that, as I was enabled thereby to find a useful item about a clinical trial of another drug being studied for possible use in ALS:

Study of Pioglitazone in Patients With Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis

And wow—I very impressed with what I have been able to do in the last several minutes thanks to ScienceRoll. It features pre-packaged PubMed searches for your search term. One of the results for Riluzole was of the article, “Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis: Clinical Management and Research Update” in the journal Current Neurology and Neuroscience Reports  This was an excellent overview to learn of and I am very grateful that there are brilliant young medical students like Bertalan Meskó of the University of Debrecen, Hungary creating search tools that enable medical librarians, clinical researchers and consumers who want authoritative medical information to find pertinent information so easily. This is just one of his many projects and it is so inspiring and moving that young scientists like him on leveraging the power of the Internet to further medical science. He is a remarkable, energetic, skillful person from whom we shall see great things. I have been in ScienceRoll for only a few minutes and already I am better versed in a subject I care deeply about. What more could be asked of a health-related search engine?

One feature of ScienceRoll I particularly liked was that among the results was a note on the side indicating how many articles were in PDF. That is very helpful—one is always on the lookout for items in PDF, given that they are often articles of substance from notable journals.

The results one gets in ScienceRoll are solid and compare well with rivals such as SearchMedica. I can see why front-line physicians such as Dr. Mike Cadogan listed it among his Top Bedside Health Search Engines 2008, Cadogan is a busy doctor and doesn’t have time to mess around with anything less than top-drawer medical search engines.

I certainly found some excellent material on ScienceRoll. For example, if I were a nurse or health science student or simply a loved one of a person with a serious condition, I would try out ScienceRoll. It is a useful complement to MedlinePlus and indeed surpasses it in some ways in terms of comprehensiveness.

For example, I found the very useful overview, “Symptom Management of the Patient With Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis: A Guide for Hospice Nurses” from the Journal of Hospice and Palliative Nursing thanks to ScienceRoll. It very helpful to read overviews written by medical professionals for their peers as it never hurts for the general public to be able to see what medical people say to one another in their efforts to improve patient care.

And here is another thing I loved about ScienceRoll. It enabled me to learn about a consumer health resource I had not heard of:  Genetics Home Reference.

Kudos then to Bertalan Meskó. Mednar, ScienceRoll. This is a wonderful time to be alive—and tools like this are making it easier for more of us to stay that way.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 5th, 2009 at 12:02 pm and is filed under Health, Verticals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.