Consumer Health Guide: Home

The American Board of Medical Specialties' doctor locator allows users to search for physicians by name, by location, or by specialty.

The American Medical Association's online physician locator provides basic professional information on more than 814,000 doctors.

Federal government’s Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion maintains this consumer health information site. Visitors to this site will find user-friendly access to fact sheets and answers to frequently-asked health questions.

Site brings together authoritative information from the National Library of Medicine, The National Institutes of Health, along with other government agencies and health-related organizations.

A variety of general health information is provided by the National Institutes of Health’s site. Topics are categorized by subject and can be browsed using quick links or an A-Z guide.

Site is managed by The Office of the Patient Advocate (OPA) is an independent office in California state government charged with informing and educating consumers about their rights and responsibilities.

Healthy People provides science-based, 10-year national objectives for improving the health of all Americans. For 3 decades, Healthy People has established benchmarks and monitored progress over time in order to encourage collaborations across sectors, guide individuals toward making informed health decisions, and measure the impact of prevention activities.

Provides information on common lab tests, including how the test sample is obtained, what the results mean, and answers to commonly asked questions. A guide to screening tests and select disease information is also provided.

Comprehensive site on physical activity information and plans for consumers and health professionals.

Information pertaining to the American Medical Association and its physician members, including how to contact them, is provided.

This site maintains hundreds of medical journal titles with full-text access to articles. Years of availability to full-text articles varies with each journal title.

“HealthMap brings together data sources to achieve a comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health. This freely available Web site integrates outbreak data of varying reliability, ranging from news sources (such as Google News) to curated personal accounts (such as ProMED) to validated official alerts (such as World Health Organization).”

How do we know whether a particular drug, therapy or operation really works, and how well? How reliable is the evidence? Are clinical trials truly unbiased?

This book aims to help you become more informed about your health care and health decisions. It will equip you with some simple tools for distinguishing between reliable and unreliable health advice.

Elsevier has partnered with Copyright Clearance Center's RightsLink to provide access to selected health-oriented journals for patients and caregivers through new service, PatientACCESS.