Ivanhoe.com
Review by: Katherine Harvey

Ivanhoe is Sir Walter Scott's most famous romantic hero ... why his name has been chosen for a medical site is a mystery to me. But let's see what adventure is in store for us anyway.

This site is not just a medical site, but prides itself in bringing the public the latest medical advances. Ivanhoe have been making medical TV programmes in the U.S for 20 years and in the last 5 years they have produced this web site as a natural extension of their reporting. When you log on you get a selection of headlines from various medical disciplines and some of them have accompanying video reports.

The site is then split into channels covering subjects from arthritis and breast cancer to sports medicine and women's health. The channels are hosted by resident journos with a particular interest in their subject. They monitor the news reports and enlist the help of experts to lead discussion forums. These are quite intense exchanges. As you can imagine, many of the contributors are suffering from a disease themselves or have a family member with the illness and are desperate to find a cure or at least a ray of hope. Unfortunately, what they find is a lot of conflicting advice from lots of different sources, but at least any alternative or new treatments are being openly discussed.

The Daily News Flash has reports of breaking medical stories, some of which claim to be exclusive to the site. Although you can probably get this information in its raw form from a medical journal, Ivanhoe picks the relevant studies and reports them in a digestible and understandable form. For anyone whose life is touched by the spectre of disease, this site is a mine of new and potentially life saving information. It's just a shame so many people seem to need it.