Health Links: The U.S. Department of Human Services offers some advice for evaluating a health care site: Does the website clearly state its purpose and its sponsors, and does it separate advertising and sales from health information? Does it get its information from reliable sources and keep it up to date? Does the site tell you what information it collects about you and how it will be protected? The Merck Manual Merck & Co.'s consumer website www.merckhomeedition.com is a rare gem, offering medical advice in a clear and straightforward manner, with virtually no advertising, making it a particularly effective marketing vehicle for the company. The "Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy" has been on doctors' bookshelves for more than 100 years. The company sells a printed "Home Edition" for consumers, but it's also on the Web at no cost. Go online and choose the plain-text version for fast access, or choose the interactive version for a wealth of photos, video, illustrations, animations and audible pronunciations of medical terms. The online Merck Manual is divided into 287 topical pages. The information can be highly technical, but much of it is immediately useful, too. The over-the-counter drugs section, for example, explains the similarities, and differences, among analgesics such as aspirin, ibuprofen, naproxen and acetaminophen. Physicians' Desk Reference Every doctor's office has a copy of the Physicians' Desk Reference (PDR), a weighty volume describing virtually all prescription drugs on the market. The information is online, too, also at no cost, but this website www.PDRhealth.com is different than the Merck site. The PDR site takes longer to load, is weighted down with health care "solutions" and requires users to submit personal information to an online registry before they can get access to the valuable drug information. Need the information today? Sorry, but it takes at least a day or two before you're registered and allowed to search the site. "Making Women's Health Healthier"