Medical Reference for the General Public

The Medical Reference staff at the State Library welcomes requests from Iowa citizens who need assistance with medical reference questions, citations, or Iowa medical history.  The State Library has a variety of online medical databases and Web sites that we can search for you or that you can search by coming to the State Library. We can also assist you in formulating search strategies for searches that you do on your own. HealthInfoIowa at www.HealthInfoIowa.org is the State Library's consumer health Web site which includes reliable health information Web sites as well as information on how to find good sites.

The Medical Library has the following Web sites available: Clinical Pharmacology, Cochrane databases for evidence-based medicine, Consumer Health Complete, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Health Source Consumer, Health Source Nursing, Iowa Public Health Information, Psychological Abstracts, and PubMed(Medline).

In addition to these online sites, the National Library of Medicine provides additional specialized medical databases for consumers and professionals that can be accessed free of charge from any computer. Go to http://www.nlm.nih.gov. We encourage consumers to contact their public libraries for information on consumer health. They have a variety of materials on consumer health as well as some medical databases that can be searched online.

The Medical Library staff can also assist with verifying citations and locating medical documents, journals, and books that are not available at the State Library. The cost of copying at the State Library is $.20 per page. Please contact us at 515-281-5772 or 800-248-4483 or e-mail us at medref@lib.state.ia.us. Our fax number is 515-281-3384