Presents up-to-date health care information, selected by the U.S. National Library of Medicine, for use by health care consumers and health professionals. Hundreds of health topics are listed alphabetically and are also grouped into 32 groups. PubMed database searches, with the search queries already formulated, can be initiated from any of the health topics in order to search for more information. Web links are also provided to dictionaries, sites about doctors and dentists, hospitals, organizations, clearinghouses, databases, consumer health publications (some written in Spanish), and libraries. Website was launched by NLM on October 22, 1998. "MEDLINEplus offers free public searches to MEDLINE, long the premier bibliographic database for medical information, as well as access to a vast amount of other information for the health care consumer. There are seven major access points: 'Health Topic, ' Dictionaries, ' 'Search Database, ' 'Clearinghouses, ' 'Directories, ' 'MEDLINE, ' 'Organizations, ' 'Publications/News, ' and 'Libraries.' By selecting a particular Health Topic, a user may access Internet resources from government agencies or private sites such as Mayo Health Oasis. A notable limitation of this site is the fact that many documents retrieved in searches of the MEDLINE database itself are not freely available."--Reviewed Feb. 25, 1999. "Best Free Reference Web Sites 1999," RUSA Quarterly, Fall 1999. Comp. by the MARS Best Free Websites Committee, RUSA, ALA.