[The Cologne internet-manual of pain therapy--33 months online, experiences and evaluation].

Objective: The improvement of ambulant treatment for patients with chronic headache or cancer pain.

Methods: Distribution of accepted guidelines and standards by means of the internet in order to make this knowledge known among general practitioners and to give patients better access to this information.

Results: We have built an internet manual about the treatment of chronic headache and cancer pain. About 9100 readers accessed the manual during a period of 33 months. The manual has been completely downloaded 279 times. Physicians and patients very often used search engines to access the manual in their search for information about headache. The terms "migraine" and "tension type headache" were looked up the most.

Conclusions: It is worthwhile editing medical information for use on the internet and thus making it available to the public.