Evaluating the Mayo Clinic website as a medical resource

Mayo Clinic is a useful site for providing broad overviews of medical conditions. It does not have a particular partisan slant in favor of, for example, certain pharmaceutical or surgical treatments, although it generally advocates accepted and tested techniques of Western medicine, with some advice about possible alternative therapies. These are suggested as complements, not as replacements to established medical treatments. The user can search through a number of alphabetically-listed conditions with ease and all conditions are divided into several categories, including symptoms, treatments, causes, and other pertinent areas of interest for patients. This makes the website very friendly for the layperson or an older individual who may be uncomfortable with computers. It might be recommended to any patient who has been recently diagnosed with a condition or has a family member who suffers from a particular medical condition and wants to use the Internet to learn more about it. The Mayo Clinic is a very reputable source and has won numerous awards for its service to the public through its website as well as an "excellent" rating from Healthwatch.org.

For a nurse seeking information about a patient, the website may be a good starting point, although it should be added that the material is not technical and is not specifically designed for nurses. Its best use for medical professionals might be a way to describe difficult information in fairly simple terms that are not 'dumbed down' and is medically accurate without being arcane.