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To the Editor.— The World Wide Web is a powerful medium for the communication of medical information. Approximately 27 million US households have Internet access and thousands of medically related Web sites have been established.¹ Despite this activity, little is known about how the Internet is used to obtain medical information.

The department of pathology at the Johns Hopkins Hospital maintains the Pancreatic Cancer Web site. In addition to content information about treatment options, research, bibliography, clinicians, and appointments, the site has an active, unmoderated discussion board (chat room) where users can post messages and read and reply to all previously posted messages. Monthly updates to the "What's New" page highlight recent advances in pancreatic cancer research.

We investigated the patterns of use and the benefits of this Web site (http://pathology.jhu.edu/pancreas). Details of these analyses are available at http://pathology.jhu.edu/pancreas.jama. Briefly, we identified 975978 accesses to this Web . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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