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Michigan State University

Consumer Health Resources

Some of the best websites available for consumers searching for health information, most of which are freely available to the public. Last updated: 3/13/24.

Not finding what you are looking for?

If you are finding that your knowledge surpasses what is available through most consumer health sites and books and you feel ready to tackle in-depth information written for health professionals, try searching some medical textbooks and journal articles.

Advanced Health Information

PubMed is also available at PubMed.gov for those that are not affiliated with MSU.

Tips:

Once you do your search, look over to the left hand side of the page. There you can choose to narrow down your results:

  • Languages lets you choose only English-language articles. To see the English filter you need to choose "Show additional filters", check the box by Languages, and click the show button. You can then click on English to filter results, or choose Customize... to filter by other languages.
  • Article types: Meta-Analysis will give you the highest level of medical evidence. These will be summaries or reviews of all the evidence based literature known on a topic. If no meta-analyses are available, you may wish to search for Clinical Trials or  Randomized Control Trials to see if any clinical studies exist on your topic. If you get nothing with these filters, you can try searching for just Reviews or Practice Guidelines.
  • Full Text of articles: MSU affiliates will see the green or white Full Text buttons near the abstracts of articles to which we have available through journals we subscribe to. You may be asked to input your MSU Net ID and password. For others who are not MSU affiliates, the left hand side of your resylts page shows a category of Text Availability. Choose "Free full text available" to see only the free articles. For articles that are not free, you are welcome to come into the MSU Libraries in person to download the full text of medical journal articles on selected resource computers. Ask at the reference desk about this.

Alternatively, if you are not an MSU affiliate you may wish to use PubMed Central, a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature. PubMed Central works very similar to PubMed, but the full-text of results are all freely available and some of the options for filtering results are different.

*MSU affiliates include current faculty, staff, and students. Unfortunately, alumni are not considered affiliates by our database licenses. Everyone is welcome to come into the MSU Libraries in person to use our advanced medical literature databases, textbook collections, and online journals.

MeL Databases

The Michigan eLibrary (MeL) has a number of health databases available in their eResources. Access to MeL resources is available to Michigan residents.