Resources for Medical Fanfiction Writing




I confess to being addicted to at least two medically-oriented TV shows, "ER" and more recently"Third Watch." In trying to write fanfiction for "ER" (**shameless plug** which you can find here), I quickly discovered that it's not easy to write a realistic plot involving a doctor-patient interaction without doing some research. Medical textbooks are invaluable, and of course your best bet is always to find a doctor, nurse, or other helpful person who is able to answer your questions.

But I found that while the Web is also a potentially great resource for looking up specific diseases and conditions, it can often be cumbersome to wade through large numbers of search results in the quest for a little information. So I created this page to bring together some of the most helpful medical information sites I could find. I'm hoping it can be a cooperative effort with suggestions from other authors too; if a medical reference you've used might be helpful to others, please write me and let me know about it, and I'll add it! Thanks. And if you find a broken link, ditto.

medspeak - the language of ER A helpful glossary of all the terms and abbreviations that are common on "ER".

Laboratory Tests and Medical Exams Simple explanations of why different diagnostic tests might be ordered.

National Center of Emergency Medicine Informatics A vast resource with tons of online information. Their goal was to have any information that an emergency physician might want to look up, all accessible online and in one place.

Emergency Medicine Online includes updates on the medical literature as well as Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine and other free resources.

The Emergency Medicine and Primary Care Homepage has files of X-rays, EKG's, and interesting clinical cases as well as topic reviews.

Trauma One! Manual gives a very complete discussion of the approach to taking care of trauma patients, and Virtual Encyclopedia of Health and Medicine appears to have an enormous list of links to other medical sites, many of them quite specialized. Both of these links are from the fanfic help desk at Angie's excellent Chicago Hope Home Page.

Web MD, a more general medical site, has sections for physicians and consumers, with appropriate health information and the latest medical updates.

National Library of Medicine's MEDLINEplus enables you to search through a comprehensive index of medical journals.

Some other sites I found with information on specific diseases and conditions are The Centers For Disease Control's Health Topics A to Z, Johns Hopkins Health Information, and University of Pennsylvania Health Care: Health Topics.





Maintained by Alice. Last updated March 26, 2001.
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