The Merck Manual
The Merck Manual has approximately 300 expert contributors and is an incredibly reliable resource for medical information. There are several different versions, including the Home Health Handbook for Patients and Caregivers and The Merck Manual for Health Care Professionals.
These tremendous online resources explain various medical disorders, who is likely to get them, their symptoms, how they're diagnosed, how they might be prevented, and how they can be treated. They also provide information about prognosis. It's hard to find reliable health and medical information online, but this is the exception.
National Institutes of Health's National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine's Herbs at a Glance
It's not easy to find helpful and scientifically sound advice on herbs or botanicals. Herbs at a Glance is produced and maintained by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (part of the prestigious National Institutes of Health) and is a series of fact sheets that provide important information about a wide variety of herbs and botanicals (e.g., acai, aloe vera, bitter orange, black cohosh, chamomile, echinacea, fenugreek, ginger, and more). The information includes common names, uses, potential side effects and much more.
County Health Rankings
How healthy is your county? Check out the County Health Rankings, created and maintained by the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The website ranks the health of nearly every county in the nation by looking at a variety of measures that affect health (i.e., the rate of people dying before age 75, high school graduation rates, access to healthier foods, air pollution levels, income and rates of smoking, obesity and teen births), then compares and contrasts this information to that of other counties. Following are a few County Health
Ranking highlights:
- People are nearly twice as likely to be in fair or poor health in the unhealthiest counties
- Unhealthy counties have significantly lower high school graduation rates
- Unhealthy counties have more than twice as many children in poverty
- Unhealthy counties have many fewer grocery stores or farmers markets
- Unhealthy counties have much higher rates of unemployment
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