MedWorm: A Useful Medical RSS Filter Engine

Lab Soft News has started to get some referrals from a web site called MedWorm so I decided to check it out. Here is how the site describes itself on its home page:

• A medical RSS filter engine.
• Over 3500 authoritative RSS feeds go in.
• Hundreds of new RSS feeds by category come out.

You can search the entire MedWorm RSS medical archive using the following categories: news, consumer-oriented information, journals, organization, information, and blogs. Checking off all of these first and then searching for clinical laboratory, as only one example, will retrieve the 159 records that you can view here. Because journals was checked, this is an efficient way to keep abreast of those clinical pathology journal articles that are available on the web via RSS feeds.

There is another valuable feature available on MedWorm that you also may want to use. Here are the medical categories offered by the site:

• Medical Blogs
• Blog Tag Cloud
• Consumer Health News
• Medical Specialties
• Medical Conditions
• Cancers
• Infectious Diseases
• Therapies
• Vaccines

If you click the term cancers, for example, a total of 58 different type of cancers are then displayed. Beside each type of cancer is an RSS button. After clicking this button for one of these lesions, you are presented with another screen where you are offered the option of subscribing to the RSS feed for references about this type of malignant lesion. I would choose My Yahoo which is the RSS reader that I use. If you click the subscribe now button, you are then taken to My Yahoo where you are asked if you want to add this particular RSS feed to the other items displayed on your My Yahoo home page.

Here is an interesting description about the ownership of MedWorm

MedWorm was built and is owned by Frankie Dolan, a UK based IT engineer who describes the site in the following way: I had been using RSS in the technology sector for my own personal use for some time when I began to realised that it could be of great benefit to some members of my family who are doctors. Since medical professionals are constantly in need of the latest information on medical research and the best methods of treatment, and are also usually overworked with little time to spare, RSS seemed ideal since it could provide the very latest information that is both concise and highly relevant to a specific area of expertise.

Comments

[Frankie Dolan]

Hi Bruce,

Thanks for the MedWorm review - nice to see that you are getting some hits from the site. Let me know if you would like to see anything added to MedWorm to make it more useful for you - I'm always grateful for any feedback and am working all the time to develop it further.

All the best,
Frankie Dolan