Access to databases in complementary medicine

Access to medical databases is a keystone for obtaining up-to-date and comp lete information for physicians. In the last few years, the rapid growth of the World Wide Web has given rise to an information revolution, enabling h ealth care providers to gain access (often free) to an expanding volume of information that was previously inaccessible. Search engines and online dat abases assist the search for health information. In this article we examine the biomedical databases of primary interest in the field of alternative a nd complementary medicine, dividing them into Web accessible and nonaccessi ble databases and emphasizing the freely available ones. A further classifi cation is major biomedical bibliographic databases specific to complementar y medicine, and dedicated therapy or modality-specific databases.