Candy Day candy@healthlink.org.za
So you’re going to have a baby? If not then surely you sometimes have to advise clients and provide information for antenatal care and child-rearing. There are some really novel and useful interactive web sites that can be recommended to provide supplemental information, but apart from that, you should be aware of what is out there for those clients who find information on the web and then come to you to clarify or check the information out. As usual, due caution should be exercised when making use of information of the net, never more so than when the application of that information may affect a tiny, innocent life. I must say though, that in this area most of the sites I found, even the commercial ones, have made quite an effort to provide quality information.
Should we share the gem first or last? This step by step interactive guide through pregnancy is one of the best uses of Shockwave technology that I’ve seen – a really impressive presentation that is even relatively quick to load, and has sound effects and annotations – unfortunately a written article can’t capture the magic, so do yourself a favour and visit www.pregnancycalendar.com/first9months/ .
Next are a couple of sites that exist primarily to sell maternity and baby merchandise, but which really go the extra mile while seeking your custom and provide a wealth of useful information, chat rooms, discussion groups, advice columns, due date calculators and more. What’s more these sites are attractively designed and well constructed, so navigating around them is a pleasure, and most provide customisation options so the site you see presents you with the information you’re most likely to be interested in, and regular email updates are tailored to your needs – I guess this keeps you surfing their sites for longer, with a greater chance that one of the merchandising hooks will grab you! This is not to discredit the content, but one must just bear the caution in mind that the presentation of information is geared to encourage online shopping. See:
Babycenter.com will email you a weekly bulletin about how the foetus is developing according to your stage of pregnancy, including dietary tips, exercise suggestions and tips from other people’s experiences. Although its very American and there are a few areas you may not agree with, in general it is quite informative and helpful for encouraging parents to make healthy and considered choices.
What's new concerning drugs used during pregnancy? Find out in this collection of recent MEDLINE abstracts compiled by the editors at Medscape Pharmacology http://pharmacotherapy.medscape.com/14769.rhtml (note: you do need to register to make use of Medscape, but this is free)
The National Library of Medicine site has some fairly good general health information – for this month, you can try http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/pregnancyandreproduction.html. The information is closely linked to the Medline system, which is quite useful for finding evidence-based information and current research results.
Healthy Pregnancy, Healthy Baby http://www.fda.gov/fdac/features/1999/299_baby.html from the US Food and Drug Administration
Another general health portal with a pregnancy section: www.allhealth.com/womens/pregnancy . This site also has a Drug Database facility which gives some information on drugs in pregnancy and general drug information sourced via the USP DI database.
Another good general health information site providing pregnancy information is www.intellihealth.com , a service of Johns Hopkins University.
March of Dimes www.modimes.org has a lot of information about birth defects, having a health baby and public health policy and stats. This organisation is trying to improve the health of all babies born.
The US National Women’s Health Information Centre http://www.4women.gov/ contains mostly publication information which may not be so useful out of the US, but also has other resources and links.
Obstetric Myths versus Research Realities http://www.efn.org/~djz/birth/obmyth/index.html provides some interesting food for thought (not all the chapters are online).
Childbirth.org www.childbirth.org/ covers everything from birth plans and stories, how to do Kegel exercises, episiotomy, caesarians… not for the faint-hearted! (But then neither is childbirth!). If you want to be even braver, visit www.naturalchildbirth.org
Web rings are semi-regulated facilities for grouping similar web sites on the web. For example http://www.fensende.com/Users/swnymph/Ring.html have set up a pregnancy web ring, and any site wishing to join the ring must meet certain criteria or quality and content, and then each site that is part of the ring has a navigation section that allows you to jump to the next site in the ring or to a random site in the ring. If the ring is of high quality, this can be quite a good way of finding related sites without having to wade through search engine results. This one is rather a mixed bag!
A rather nice, personal site from this web ring that combines personal experience with researched information can be found at http://www.bonni.net/birth/links/index.html
Better Births and Babies http://www.geocities.com/HotSprings/9235/index.html
The Miracle of Birth http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Acres/5443/childbirth.html
For some lighthearted reading try http://www.westnet.com/~crywalt/pregnancy/contents.html
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