How do I know it’s credible?

Many moons ago I wrote about how to tell if a health website is credible.  There is so much information floating around on the Internet that it’s difficult to tell whether non-peer reviewed medical information is accurate at all.  Just Google for information on the latest health craze or your child’s ailments and you’ll see what I mean.  Fortunately for us, the Medical Library Association has come up with a solution to this problem.  The result?  Their latest publication called A User’s Guide to Finding and Evaluating Health Information on the Web.

The top ten.

I’m proud to say that many of the sites I use and often recommend are on the MLA’s top ten most useful consumer health websites.  Check ‘em out!

• Cancer.gov - the official website for The National Cancer Institute (NCI), the Federal Government’s principal agency for cancer research and training.
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services, is dedicated to promoting “health and quality of life by preventing and controlling disease, injury, and disability.” Search their health topics from A to Z or learn how to be a healthy traveler.
• familydoctor.org - operated by the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), a national medical organization representing more than 93,700 family physicians, family practice residents and medical students. All of the information on this site has been written and reviewed by physicians and patient education professionals at the AAFP.
• Healthfinder® - a gateway consumer health information website whose goal is “to improve consumer access to selected health information from government agencies, their many partner organizations, and other reliable sources that serve the public interest.”
• HIV InSite - a project of the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) AIDS Research Institute, designed to provide in-depth information about particular aspects of HIV/AIDS.
• Kidshealth® - doctor-approved health information about children from before birth through adolescence created by The Nemours Foundation’s Center for Children’s Health Media.
• MayoClinic - an extension of the Mayo Clinic’s commitment to provide health education to patients and the general public with more than 2,000 physicians, scientists, writers, and educators.
• Medem - a project of the leading medical societies in the United States including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists developed to provide “a trusted online source for credible, comprehensive, and clinical healthcare information, and secure, confidential communications.”
• MEDLINEplus - a consumer-oriented website established by the National Library of Medicine, the world’s largest biomedical library and creator of the MEDLINE database.
• NOAH: New York Online Access to Health - a unique collection of state, local, and federal health resources for consumers “to provide high-quality, full-text information for consumers that is accurate, timely, relevant, and unbiased.”