Nursing Research: Medical Information

"The A.D.A.M. Medical Encyclopedia includes over 4,000 articles about diseases, tests, symptoms, injuries, and surgeries. It also contains an extensive library of medical photographs and illustrations."

This Flash-based tutorial is aimed at health consumers rather than health professionals, but you may find it a quick refresher on medical terms.

Searches in this database pull results from a wide range of government databases and will even connect to information in clinical trials and journal articles via Pubmed.

WebMD’s Pill Identifier can help you put a name to an unknown medication. It identifies prescription and over-the-counter (OTC) meds that you take in solid form by mouth, like tablets and capsules.

Drugs@FDA allows you to search for official information about FDA approved brand name and generic drugs and therapeutic biological products.

RxClass allows users to search by class name or identifier to find the RxNorm drug members or, conversely, search by RxNorm drug name or identifier to find the classes that the RxNorm drug is a member.

Over 30,000 searchable digital books and other items related to medicine. A great place to look for old illustrations.

The National Library of medicine provides access to many of their resources on the history of medicine, including books, films, photographs, and more.

This division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gathers statistics on all manner of health topics, from aging and birth rates to diseases and physical activity. The place to start looking for health statistics

Statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau that cover "health expenditures and insurance coverage, including Medicare and Medicaid, medical personnel, hospitals, nursing homes and other care facilities, injuries, diseases, disability status, nutritional intake of the population, and food consumption.

A joint effort of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, this site ranks counties on various health factors within their states. An interesting way to compare health characteristics in various locales.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is charged with tracking a wide range of diseases, and provides up-to-date information on them. This can be a good place to look for statistics, and information is often grouped into professional and public approaches.

The Mayo Clinic has long been a leader in providing quality health care. This site has brief patient-focused descriptions of diseases, along with possible treatment options.