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Background Information
---MedlinePlus Tutorial for Librarians and Health Educators is available in Spanish. https://tinyurl.com/ye25s4w2
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Food and Drug Administration
--The information for consumers is here.
Johns Hopkins Health Library
--The menu includes information about diseases and conditions, tests and treatments, wellness and prevention, and more.
--UpToDate - Patient Education
This is the UpToDate database's section for patients; scroll down to see the list of topics. These pages will appear in any search that you do.
AccessMedicine is a database of respected medical textbooks.
- Your search will give you a list of book chapters about your topic
- Look on the database list for other searchable "Access..." books
Before you get to the specific information such as articles or statistics, get an overview of your topic:
1) Medical information for consumers in Medlineplus.gov
2) Encyclopedias and handbooks -- For example, here are online public-health-related encyclopedias and handbooks, 2020+ .
3) Go to PubMed and use MeSH (the excellent thesaurus), which also has definitions!
4) Look for REVIEW ARTICLES. In most databases, just add the word "review" to your TITLE words.
In PubMed :
- Do your search
- On the left, under "Article Type," click "Review"
5) Force Google to find reports and other info from U.S. government sites -- add this to your search: site:.gov
(Anything in the list with "ncbi" in it is a PubMed article; you can exclude those by adding -ncbi [note the minus sign].)
- A few examples:
Health Literacy: Culture and Language (October 2024; CDC)
Healthy People 2030 (Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion; DHHS)
Minority Health (CDC)
6) CQ Researcher for background and summaries of topics -- Make sure to notice dates!
- A clinical trial is a research study in human volunteers to answer specific health questions and to find treatments that work in people. This site explains how trials work, gives definitions of terms, and allows you to search for trials by medical condition, location of trial, eligibility, and more.
- The menu is on the top right
- The major topics are Food; Drugs; Medical Devices; Vaccines, Blood, and Biologics; Animal and Veterinary Products; Cosmetics; AND Radiation-emitting products
You can also force Google to find reports and other info from U.S. government sites by adding this to your search: site:.gov
(Most things in the list with "ncbi" in them will be PubMed articles -- you can exclude those by adding -ncbi [note the minus sign].)
- A few examples:
Health Literacy: Culture and Language (October 2024; CDC)
Healthy People 2030 (Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion; DHHS)
Minority Health (CDC)
Rural Health Information Hub (RHIhub)
- Collaboration of (1) University of North Dakota Center for Rural Health (UND-CRH), (2) Rural Policy Research Institute (RUPRI; University of Iowa College of Public Health), and (3) the NORC Walsh Center for Rural Health Analysis (University of Chicago)
- Includes news, guides to topics and to states, and more