New website question

Welcome to Webmasterworld! As for what's best, take a look at your competition and see what they are doing. And also see if they are doing well...

Is it possible to have one website with several different affiliates? is that beneficial in any way?

It depends on exactly what you're trying to do, but most people use multiple affiliates per site. Otherwise, you could be focusing all your efforts to promote one affiliate program that then disappears (or terminates you) overnight.

Yes, but how does one exactly check up on the competition? How do I find the affiliate sites?

Welcome Family_Guy. If I understand correctly, you have products that you want to sell via affiliate marketing. You have a few ways to go about this, but what I would recommend is to look into networks such as cj, shareasale etc and see which would work out best for you. CJ has the most affiliates, but has a much higher cost of entry, while shareasale also has a good number of affiliates, but with much lower entry costs.

Yes, but how does one exactly check up on the competition?

Its your business sector, presumably you know who your competitors are, read your trade journals, go to conferences etc etc

Just another thought...

How about becoming a sales rep for those medical companies instead of being an affiliate?

It seems that you have competencies that a lot of web business owners don't have (i.e., you know what you are talking about when it comes to medical supplies).

maybe you would be able to generate a better income by picking up the phone and calling potential customers instead of trying to get them passively.

Just throwing this out there.