It’s a new year, and new years are always a fun time for top ten lists. So, I thought I’d share with everyone my favorite health-consumer websites. There’s a lot of bad information out there, and with these websites you can have fair reassurance that the information is vetted by physicians, is up to date, and has little direct commercial agenda. In no particular order:

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – This is a treasure-trove of information, from diseases to travel advice and healthy living.

UpToDate Patients – a bit more dry and wordy than the other sites, but extremely useful and relevant regarding diseases and treatments. Many doctors, including me, consider UpToDate’s physician section the best in the world for evidence-based information, so the patient information can be similarly trusted.

WebMD – a bit commercial, but still very useful and informed.

MayoClinic – a well designed and very readable collection of information on diseases, symptoms, drugs and tests

New York Times Health Section – An outstanding source for the latest news on general health. You can also subscribe to weekly email updates, as well as follow their excellent blog called The Well.

Hong Kong Center for Food Safety – This is my favorite website anywhere for information on foods. They are a treasure trove of PDF’s, both in english and Chinese, on literally hundreds of topics.

FamilyDoctor – sponsored by the American Academy of Family Physicians, this has an excellent selection of highly readable disease articles

New England Journal of Medicine – This is one of the top medical journals in the world, and people using a computer within China are lucky enough to get full and free access to their entire 100-plus year database of articles. It’s mostly doctor-level articles but much is very readable and fascinating for the layman, especially their review articles.

Medscape – This is more for doctors (created by the same folks at WebMD) but it has an excellent, free collection of articles.

MedlinePlus – another nice collection of information.

How To Know Which Sites Are Good, or Bad?

One way to check other sites is to first go to the Health on Net website. They are an independent NGO that reviews medical sites and approves only those considered of high quality and no bias or sneaky sales techniques. They have search engines as well as toolbars for Firefox and Internet Explorer. MyHealthBeijing was proud to be recently screened and approved for inclusion.