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Top 20 Must-Visit Health and Medical Websites

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In today’s digital world, finding trustworthy health information online can be challenging. This guide covers the top 20 reliable health and medical websites, highlighting why each one is worth visiting. Discover their strengths, how they compare to each other, and why their information is reliable. Here’s the list:

Visit WebMD Why to Visit: WebMD is known for easy-to-understand medical information. What’s Best About This Website: It features a symptom checker and thousands of health topics. Why Given Info Is Correct: Content is reviewed by doctors and experts. Compare with Other Websites: Unlike MedicalTimes.io, it offers a larger database but can be dense. Info Check: Frequently updated with credible medical sources.

2. Mayo Clinic

Visit Mayo Clinic Why to Visit: Known for evidence-based information on diseases, treatments, and wellness. What’s Best About This Website: Developed by Mayo Clinic medical professionals, ensuring accuracy. Why Given Info Is Correct: Vetted by health experts and researchers. Compare with Other Websites: Similar to MedicalTimes.io but with a more clinical tone. Info Check: Based on Mayo Clinic’s clinical research and regularly updated.

3. Healthline

Visit Healthline Why to Visit: Great for general health, nutrition, and mental health topics. What’s Best About This Website: Patient stories add a human touch, along with expert insights. Why Given Info Is Correct: Medical review process and frequent updates. Compare with Other Websites: More accessible than WebMD, and user-friendly. Info Check: Sources are provided with articles for transparency.

4. MedlinePlus

Visit MedlinePlus Why to Visit: Produced by the U.S. National Library of Medicine for reliable, basic health info. What’s Best About This Website: Available in English and Spanish. Why Given Info Is Correct: Content by federal health experts. Compare with Other Websites: More formal than Healthline but highly accurate. Info Check: Based on national health guidelines and research.

5. Cleveland Clinic Health Essentials

Visit Cleveland Clinic Why to Visit: For health tips and the latest wellness news. What’s Best About This Website: Articles written by Cleveland Clinic’s medical staff. Why Given Info Is Correct: Supported by a reputable hospital system. Compare with Other Websites: Less extensive than Mayo Clinic but practical. Info Check: Regularly reviewed to reflect up-to-date medical standards.

6. Everyday Health

Visit Everyday Health Why to Visit: Known for balanced health and wellness advice. What’s Best About This Website: User-friendly with a broad range of topics. Why Given Info Is Correct: Reviewed by health experts. Compare with Other Websites: More lifestyle-focused than WebMD. Info Check: References reputable sources, linking to studies and data.

7. National Health Service (NHS)

Visit NHS Why to Visit: From the UK’s NHS, known for clear, reliable medical advice. What’s Best About This Website: Comprehensive and vetted by professionals. Why Given Info Is Correct: Developed by the UK government’s health team. Compare with Other Websites: Broader range but similar in quality to MedlinePlus. Info Check: Regularly updated according to UK health guidelines.

8. Harvard Health Publishing

Visit Harvard Health Why to Visit: For scientifically-backed articles and health tips from Harvard Medical School. What’s Best About This Website: Written by Harvard faculty, with an emphasis on research. Why Given Info Is Correct: Developed by medical professors and researchers. Compare with Other Websites: Similar to Mayo Clinic but with an academic approach. Info Check: Each article is thoroughly researched and cited.

9. National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Visit NIH Why to Visit: A reliable source of research-backed health information. What’s Best About This Website: Broad coverage of diseases, treatments, and research news. Why Given Info Is Correct: Content reviewed by federal health researchers. Compare with Other Websites: More research-focused than sites like Healthline. Info Check: Based on federal health and clinical research standards.

10. MedicalTimes.io

Visit MedicalTimes.io Why to Visit: MedicalTimes.io covers health news, wellness tips, and medical insights in a reader-friendly way. What’s Best About This Website: Articles written and explained by doctors. Why Given Info Is Correct: Information is backed by medical professionals, ensuring reliability. Compare with Other Websites: More focused on readability than WebMD and others. Info Check: Updated regularly to stay current with health developments.

11. National Cancer Institute

Visit NCI Why to Visit: For detailed cancer -related information. What’s Best About This Website: Focused on prevention, research, and treatment. Why Given Info Is Correct: Content developed by cancer experts. Compare with Other Websites: Specializes in cancer compared to general sites. Info Check: Federal government health data and clinical research sources.

12. American Heart Association (AHA)

Visit AHA Why to Visit: Heart health, prevention, and treatment information. What’s Best About This Website: Resources on heart disease, stroke, and prevention. Why Given Info Is Correct: Vetted by cardiovascular experts. Compare with Other Websites: Narrow focus on heart health. Info Check: Updated regularly based on cardiovascular guidelines.

13. Drugs.com

Visit Drugs.com Why to Visit: For comprehensive drug information, side effects, and interactions. What’s Best About This Website: Clear info on medications and supplements . Why Given Info Is Correct: Verified by pharmacists and medical professionals. Compare with Other Websites: Best for drug-specific information. Info Check: Updated frequently with FDA guidelines.

14. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

Visit CDC Why to Visit: Leading source for disease prevention and public health information. What’s Best About This Website: Detailed guides on diseases, vaccinations, and prevention. Why Given Info Is Correct: Content developed by top public health experts. Compare with Other Websites: More prevention-focused than MedicalTimes.io. Info Check: Updated per U.S. health guidelines.

15. Mental Health America

Visit MHA Why to Visit: Mental health resources and support. What’s Best About This Website: Focuses on mental health education and stigma reduction. Why Given Info Is Correct: Content reviewed by mental health professionals . Compare with Other Websites: Exclusively mental health-focused. Info Check: Updated with resources for mental wellness.

16. American Cancer Society

Visit ACS Why to Visit: Comprehensive cancer information and patient resources. What’s Best About This Website: Offers resources for cancer patients and their families. Why Given Info Is Correct: Verified by oncologists and cancer specialists. Compare with Other Websites: Cancer-focused, like NCI. Info Check: Updated frequently with cancer research developments.

17. Johns Hopkins Medicine

Visit Johns Hopkins Medicine Why to Visit: For expert healthcare advice from a world-renowned hospital. What’s Best About This Website: Articles developed by Johns Hopkins physicians. Why Given Info Is Correct: Content vetted by leading medical researchers. Compare with Other Websites: Similar in quality to Mayo Clinic. Info Check: Based on clinical research and patient care standards.

18. Merck Manual

Visit Merck Manual Why to Visit: For in-depth medical reference for conditions and treatments. What’s Best About This Website: Detailed medical information, free for the public. Why Given Info Is Correct: Content reviewed by medical experts. Compare with Other Websites: Detailed and somewhat technical. Info Check: Updated with current medical guidelines.

19. World Health Organization (WHO)

Visit WHO Why to Visit: For international health statistics and public health data. What’s Best About This Website: Offers global health perspectives and guidelines. Why Given Info Is Correct: Reviewed by global health experts. Compare with Other Websites: Broad, global scope. Info Check: Updated per international health standards.

Visit PubMed Why to Visit: Database of scientific research papers for more technical readers. What’s Best About This Website: Access to millions of medical research studies. Why Given Info Is Correct: Content is directly from scientific journals. Compare with Other Websites: Best for professionals, unlike MedicalTimes.io’s public focus. Info Check: Managed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

For more insights on health topics, visit MedicalTimes.io .

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Find Reliable Health Information

MedlinePlus MedlinePlus offers up-to-date information about diseases, conditions, and wellness issues in language you can understand. MedlinePlus is also available in Spanish . PubMed PubMed has more than 28 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites. Learn more about how to limit your search to articles that have free full text available.  Electronic Databases & Directories Alphabetical List Subject List

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ClinicalTrials.gov   Search ClinicalTrials.gov for actively recruiting studies that you may be able to participate in or learn about new interventions/treatments that are being considered.

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Last Reviewed: August 18, 2023

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7 trusted medical journal search engines

When you’re sourcing evidence for your writing projects, it is essential you access recent credible health and medical information: Enter medical journal search engines.

LAST UPDATED: October 5, 2024 | AUTHOR: Dinethra Menon

When you’re sourcing evidence for your writing projects, it is essential you access recent credible health and medical information. That’s where reliable medical journal search engines can be helpful.

A medical journal search engine is a centralised online platform that allows you to find literature on any medical topic within seconds. Bioinformatics researchers have found using more than one platform for a targeted search produces broader search results compared to using only one search engine.

While it may not be practical to use all the medical journal search engines listed in this article, having two or three ‘go-to’ medical journal search engines can help you consistently source quality evidence.

Finding a medical journal search engine

Search engines are designed to integrate with an online academic database of archived published literature.

Large medical journal databases index articles from thousands of journals all across the world.

Here are just a few databases commonly used by credible medical search engines:

• EMBASE – owned by Elsevier with over 29 million records
• MEDLINE – contains more than 22 million biomedical published articles in its archive
• PsycINFO – contains more than 3.5 million records
• Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR)
• MedlinePlus

7 reliable search engines for your health writing

PubMed is probably the first online search engine that comes to mind for health writers. It is a free online archive of medical journal articles maintained by the United States National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine (NLM).

It contains over 25 million records and searches several databases – including interfacing with MEDLINE and other publications by the NLM, such as MedlinePlus.

You can easily refine your search per topic in PubMed by typing search terms to the MeSH (Medical subject text heading) to filter results and find specific journal articles. It’s also a great resource if you’re writing patient education materials .

If you have a login access from your institution, there are other search engines that search MEDLINE, such as Ovid , Ebscohost and ProQuest .

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3. Web of Science

Web of Science uses a large database of 8,700 international scientific journals from Thomson Reuters. The database includes a large number of international publications from Asia and requires a subscription to access the articles.

Web of Science has a useful database to search for scholarly research data on emerging trends if you’re writing protocols or guidelines. It covers over 250 disciplines in science, social science, arts and humanities.

4. Science Direct

You may already be familiar with ScienceDirec t. It is a full-text scientific database, which can really help your writing when you need to read more than the abstract.

The search engine allows you to find articles in over 3,800 science, technology and medicine journals owned by academic publisher Elsevier.

Another similar portal is SpringerLink that has access to over five million articles in journals operated by publisher Springer.

In 2006, an American researcher authored a review suggesting  that, if you regularly use Web of Science to search for articles, Scopus can be a great complement – as neither resource includes everything published.

Scopus is a large database of over 60 million peer-reviewed literature also owned by Elsevier. Scopus interfaces with the EMBASE and MEDLINE databases to search records for journal articles.

You can access the full-text articles from more than 4,200 full-text journals, however login may be required via a subscription for some full-text journal articles.

6. Cochrane Library

If you’re looking for systematic reviews or meta-analyses, you should search the Cochrane Library . In addition to results obtained from the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR), Cochrane library search results can also include control trials in MEDLINE and EMBASE, Cochrane protocols and editorials.

Cochrane library is a subscription-based search platform. However, some open-access articles may be retrieved, depending on when the article is published.

7. Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a free medical journal search engine indexing journal articles from a variety of databases. If you regularly use Google to search online, using Google Scholar will come quite naturally and you can easily navigate and filter the results to suit your search.

Google Scholar is a great secondary search engine to use after your initial search. If you’re having trouble finding an article, often a search in Google Scholar can help you find the article.

Open-access search engines

If you don’t have access to full-text articles through an institution, there are several medical journal search engines that provide open access to  free journal articles :

• Directory of Open Access Journals – the database has about 10,000 journals available for open-access
• Open Science Directory – about 13,000 scientific journals are available with open-access
• Free Medical Journals  – indexes about 4832 peer-reviewed journals with open-access
• OpenMD.com – health search engine spanning multiple sources and government databases
• Trip Database – medical search engine with filters for evidence type.

What’s your preferred medical search engine for finding journal articles? 

About Dinethra Menon

Dinethra Menon is a medical and science writer with over a decade of experience communicating and writing medical education for doctors. She has a Bachelor of Science from the University of Melbourne and a postgraduate diploma in genetic counseling. Connect with her on LinkedIn , follow her on Twitter - @dinethra_menon or check out her Facebook page, Living With Hereditary Disease .

Dinethra is a member of the Health Writer Hub Alumni .

Health Research 4 U

Safe To Play

Don’t Get Fooled: These Health Websites Aren’t What You Think They Are

Diana Zuckerman, PhD, BottomLine: August 22, 2018.

Say you type “cancer” into your search engine and click on the result Cancer.com. At the bottom of the page, you see the logo of the nonprofit American Cancer Society (ACS). So is Cancer.com the ACS’s website?

Not at all. The American Cancer ­Society site is  Cancer.org , not Cancer.com. Nor have you landed on the website of the National Cancer Institute. That one is  Cancer.gov . In truth, Cancer.com is a commercial site put up by the drug manufacturer Janssen, owned by Johnson & Johnson. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s biased or misleading. Cancer.com includes reliable information from reputable organizations. But it’s worth knowing who funds a site because it may affect what information is presented. More confusing website domain names…

Health.com vs.  Health.gov .  The former is run by the publisher Time, Inc., and includes articles about celebrities, for example. The latter is the US government’s website to educate the public about health issues.

Vaccines.com vs.  Vaccines.gov .  The .com is run by Sanofi Pasteur, a vaccine manufacturer. The latter belongs to the US Department of Health and Human Services.

Healthcare.com vs.  Healthcare.gov .  The .gov site is the only federal site that lets you apply for subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. The .com site is a commercial site that earns money from advertisers and companies hoping to sell you health insurance.

To avoid confusion, especially on a topic as important as health, give yourself a refresher on web name suffixes. A “.com” usually is a commercial site, although it may provide accurate information. ( Editorial note:  Our own site,  BottomLineInc.com , has strict guidelines that protect editorial content from commercial influence.)

Other web suffixes include…

.gov.  A government site, often a good place to start a health search.

.edu.  Academic institutions use this one—another good source.

.org.  These sites are run by organizations, usually (but not always) nonprofit. Their trustworthiness varies and may be influenced by where they get funding.

Read the original article here .

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For students & teachers, how to find credible medical websites for research.

EVERFI Content Team

The Internet is a powerful tool, but it is not without pitfalls. It is no secret that the Internet is the primary form of research for our students — medical information included.

Teaching our students how to use the Internet for medical information comes with a unique set of challenges. Below, we’ll break down how to judge the credibility of online sources.

What Do We Risk?

In a world defined by instant access to communication, we run the risk of our students leaping to incorrect conclusions. For medical information (used to inform medical decisions), this is incredibly dangerous.

Wrong, unsafe, or incorrectly understood medical information can have a very real impact on the lives of our students.

Online Medical Information: How Do We Determine Credibility?

The Who: Always Look to the Source First

The first step in gauging credibility is to analyze the source. Consider publications from the following:

• Mayo Clinic, a nonprofit academic medical center
• National Institutes of Health (NIH), a part of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
• Johns Hopkins Hospital, one of the world’s premier teaching and biomedical research hospitals

The above institutions are examples of nonprofit, publicly funded, or university-affiliated medical centers. As a general rule of thumb, students can consider information from these sources to be impartial and accurate.

On the other hand, imagine information from the following fictional organizations:

• The Academy of Tobacco Studies, a for-profit research center funded by tobacco companies
• “Aunt Betsy Knows Best”, a blog selling herbal remedies for serious medical conditions

Clearly, these are not credible medical websites for research!

Yes, the examples are extreme. The core approach, however, remains the same — look to the source. If the source has an agenda, the website may lack credibility.

Tip: Websites ending in “.gov” (government) or “.edu” (top level domain for education) tend to be the most credible.

The What: What Information is Offered?

Consider the information offered by the website. For example, this article on the common cold from the Mayo Clinic gives a comprehensive overview of the disease. It offers general treatment tips, of course, but it doesn’t push a product — at best, it briefly mentions a generic medicine brand once or twice.

Tip: If a medical information website is telling the visitor to buy a specific product, it’s likely best to run in the other direction.

The When: Is the Information Current?

Outdated medical information is as potentially hazardous as incorrect content. It’s best to teach students to always check for a publication date.

Tip: The most credible online medical resources probably have the budget for quality web design. If the website looks and feels questionable, it probably is.

The Where: Where Did the Information Come From?

A few minutes spent poking around online can yield “evidence” that the 1969 Moon Landing is a government conspiracy and that smoking is good for your health. It’s vital that students understand where information comes from.

When our students stumble across medical information online, have them consider the following:

• What evidence does it provide?
• Is the evidence from a respectable, peer-reviewed medical publication?
• If the website provides studies as sources, do the studies back up the website author’s claims?

Tip: Medical studies have published abstracts — taking a minute to verify a study supports a website’s information is quick and easy.

The Why: Why Does This Website Exist?

As a pair of general rules:

• Credible online medical resources inform; they do not diagnose.
• Credible sources may recommend treatments; they do not sell medication.

Ask your students to take a minute and consider why a medical website exists. Informative articles from the Mayo Clinic, NIH, or Johns Hopkins exist to provide an objective understanding of a medical issue.

The more we instill a healthy sense of skepticism in our students, the better equipped they will be.

Tip: If a website pushes a treatment or recommends self-diagnosis without a doctor present, run for the hills!

What Are Some Credible Medical Websites For Research?

Our students can develop an appreciation for quality online medical information below:

• Johns Hopkins Medicine : premier teaching and biomedical research center
• Mayo Clinic : Nonprofit medical center
• DailyMed : Government-run drug information website
• MedlinePlus : Government-run health information website
• National Institutes of Health : Government-run health information website

Better Students, Better Research

There’s a lot of medical information on the Internet. Instilling our students with the right mindset for how to find credible medical information online is vital.

If our students can differentiate between credible medical websites and illegitimate ones, we can breathe a sigh of relief.

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Credible Sources for Students FAQs

Why do students need credible sources in their research papers.

Incorporating credible sources into research papers is a crucial aspect of academic writing. It serves multiple purposes, such as ensuring the accuracy and validity of the information presented, avoiding plagiarism, developing critical thinking skills, and building a strong academic reputation.

Want to prepare students for career and life success, but short on time?

Busy teachers use EVERFI’s standards-aligned, ready-made digital lessons to teach students to thrive in an ever-changing world.

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