Charisios Karanikiotes M.D., Mitragas Apostolos M.D.
17 Kallipoleos str , 54454 Thessaloniki , Greece
The Internet offers exciting new opportunities for information exchange to all acupuncture professionals. In April of 1996, we began to develop , with the technical support of the Laboratory of Medical Informatics at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki , a World Wide Web demonstration project , the Medical Acupuncture WebPage. Our objective in developing the Medical Acupuncture WebPage is to provide comprehensive information about many aspects of Medical Acupuncture for both healthcare professionals and patients.
Specifically, our main purposes are:
(1) the rapid and free of charge dissemination of information relevant to acupuncture to medically qualified acupuncturists and acupuncture practitioners
(2) to familiarise non acupuncturists health care professionals about the therapeutic properties of acupuncture
(3) to provide basic educational material to medical students
(4) to inform the public of the advantages of medical acupuncture
(5) to promote the activities of Hellenic Medical Acupuncture Associations
(6) to communicate with other acupuncture associations and professionals around the world
(7) to provide a hypertext system to access other acupuncture information resources on the Internet.
Since its creation, the total of our pages has been accessed more than 160000 times by almost 8000 visitors in 36 countries. 70% of them were health care professionals. It is a fact that the number of professionals who use Internet as a medium to access scientific information and interact with their colleagues , is growing.
In this view , we believe that the Medical Acupuncture WebPage is interesting and useful to the international acupuncture community.