Information delivered to your (electronic) door

E-mail delivery services make the Internet even easier to find dermatologic information

Iowa City, Iowa - If navigating the Web to get meaningful dermatology information seems laborious and slow, it may be time to take a new look at how you interface with the Internet, said Thomas L. Ray, M.D.

Thanks to a growing list of e-mail information delivery services, it is easier to separate the wheat from the chaff and have the best stuff delivered automatically to your electronic inbox, according to Dr. Ray, professor of dermatology at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

As high-powered Internet tools transform the world's communication infrastructure, it is easy to overlook the power of lowly text e-mail, which gives editors, product vendors, and dermatologists the power to instantly and efficiently disseminate up-to-date information for next to nothing.

"The whole idea is to get yourself set up so the information comes to you," Dr. Ray said.

The sudden omnipresence of the 'net over the past few years has led some to dub it the "25-year overnight sensation." The number of Internet users worldwide has doubled at regular 10- to 12-month intervals over the past few decades. As a result, use of e-mail has skyrocketed. In 1995, there were 6.5 billion e-mail transmissions.

"The number today is beyond my computational ability, but it's probably approaching 100 billion," Dr. Ray said.

Currently, a full one in seven persons in the United States has access to e-mail.

Dr. Ray urged the uninitiated to establish an e-mail account to keep in touch with the kids at college, converse with friends and colleagues, and most importantly, to access news, announcement/alert services, and contributor-- driven mailing lists that unite dermatologists who have similar interests.

Announcement services can deliver an e-mail to you containing information about the latest clinical trial openings (www.centerwatch.com), airfare sales to your favorite conference destination (www.travelocity.com), or even to buy/sell trigger points for your portfolio (www.stockalerts.com).

Only a handful of dermatologists worldwide have subscribed to dermatologic mailing lists. Members of these lists can e-mail case reports, news, lesion images, or other pertinent information to a computer list server, which in turn resends the e-mail to every subscriber.

Vital Dermatology Links

The University of Iowa Department of Dermatology Web site (tray.dermatology.uiowa.edu) has links to more than a dozen dermatology-related e-mail list services, including some of the more popular ones:

* RxDERM-L: This list, founded and maintained by Art C. Huntley, M.D., includes discussion of therapies of interest to practicing dermatologists. Membership, which tops 700, is for the most part limited to dermatologists, who can subscribe by sending an e-mail to listproc@ucdavis.edu with the text "subscribe rxderm-L" followed by first and last name in the body of the message (i.e., "subscribe rxderm-L John Smith"). "This is a large and remarkably vibrant group," Dr. Ray said.

* ACADERM-L: Academic dermatologists use this list, also maintained by Dr. Huntley, to discuss topics of interest. It can be subscribed to by sending an email to listproc@ucdavis.edu with "subscribe acaderm-L" followed by a physician's first and last name.

The power of e-mail is not lost on the Academy, Dr. Ray said, noting that email is used not only as a way to communicate between individuals but as a way to conduct business within committees and task forces.

Many inexpensive computers and modems can be used to access text, graphics, and sound files delivered by e-mail. A variety of free or inexpensive programs also are available to retrieve the messages. For example, the Netscape Communicator software suite (www.netscape.com/download) contains a fully-functional e-mail reader, while Eudora Pro (www.eudora.com) allows users to send and receive voice messages. DT