There is a wealth of information available on the Internet. Anyone can put up a website, however, so it’s important to get your information from reliable sources, such as government agencies, professional associations, and universities. Here are some websites with evidence-based information.

For general information, the National Institutes of Health has a consumer-friendly website called Medline Plus (http://www.medlineplus.gov), which has articles and links to other solid sources of information (including Lab Tests Online).

Clinical treatment guidelines are available at the National Guideline Clearinghouse of the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (http://www.guideline.gov) and the Institute for Clinical Systems Improvement (http://www.icsi.org).

For information on specific conditions, there are many sources of interactive decision trees that help choose treatments and courses of action. You can find decision trees on various forms of cancer at the American Cancer Society (http://www.cancer.org) and the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (http://www.leukemia-lymphoma.org). For heart and circulatory conditions, consult the American Heart Association (http://www.americanheart.org).

Several leading health organizations (American Diabetes Association, American Cancer Society, and American Heart Association) have teamed up with leading medical publishers to launch a website to give consumers access to medical journal articles accompanied by background material to help interpret the articles and put them in context. The website is http://www.patientINFORM.org

Other sources of EBM information at various levels of consumer friendliness are Bandolier (http://www.jr2.ox.ac.uk/bandolier); the British Medical Journal, which has been working on synopses for patients (http://www.bmj.com); and the most ambitious undertaking, the Cochrane Collaboration (http://www.cochrane.org) with its more consumer-friendly sister site, http://www.informedhealthonline.org.

Some medical journals are trying to make information available directly to consumers. For example, the American College of Physicians’ Annals of Internal Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association include summaries for patients of their articles on their websites (http://www.annals.org/current.shtml, http://jama.ama-assn.org/). Even in a peer-reviewed journal, however, not every article meets the criteria of being evidence-based, so readers beware.

The Journal of Family Practice posts some evidence-based guidelines and summaries. Registration is required, but there is no charge to access information that is six months old (http://www.jfponline.com).

Consumers Union now has a Consumer Reports-style health website (http://www.consumerreportshealth.org) that is designed to give EBM-based material, based on the reference tool, Clinical Evidence. It is available by subscription but has some interesting free material about evidence-based medicine and how patients can make informed decisions.

Consumers Union has also launched a website designed to provide EBM-based evaluations and comparisons of prescription drugs (http://www.crbestbuydrugs.org).

A subscription service designed for physicians now has a free “Patient-level Information” component (http://www.patients.uptodate.com). Many physicians subscribe to its online service, which provides EBM-style summaries, Up-to-Date (http://www.uptodate.com), and a similar service, InfoPOEMs (http://www.infopoems.com).

If you feel competent to read journals and article abstracts yourself, you can find them at the National Institutes of Health website, PubMed, which includes more than 15 million citations for biomedical articles and links to many sites providing full texts of articles and other related resources. (http://www.pubmed.gov or http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi)

The American Academy of Family Physicians website has a helpful article, “A Simple Method for Evaluating the Clinical Literature,” that is meant for physicians, but is comprehensible to lay readers as well (http://www.aafp.org/fpm/20040500/47asim.html).