How to Find Trusted Health Information Online

To all wise seniors

How do I know if the health information on a website is trustworthy? When I want to find out something, I usually do a Google search for my symptoms, medications, or health conditions, but there’s so much information out there that I don’t know what to trust.

Skeptical Monkey

Dear Monkey,

It’s wise to be skeptical. There’s a ton of health advice on the internet these days, and it can be hard to know what to trust. To help you cut through the online clutter and find trustworthy health information, here are some tips to follow, along with the top sites you can trust with confidence.

Smart Search

First, know that Google or Bing aren’t always the best place to start your search. You’re more likely to find trustworthy health information if you start with websites run by government agencies (identified by a URL ending in .gov), medical associations (often .org), or academic institutions (.edu).

Commercial websites (usually ending in .com) from pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, or other companies trying to sell you their products are usually not very trustworthy options. To find out who is sponsoring a site and where the information is coming from, click on the “About Us” tab on the site’s home page.

Also, because health and medical information is constantly changing, please check the publication date of the information to make sure it is up to date.

Other things to be wary of are online symptom checkers and artificial intelligence (AI) tools. While symptom checkers can certainly offer diagnoses that may fit your symptoms, they are often inaccurate and tend to err on the side of caution, says Ativ Mehrotra, MD, professor of health policy at Harvard Medical School. AI tools like ChatGPT can also be wrong or produce scientific-sounding misinformation.

You should also be careful about using medical information from social media, online forums, and YouTube. Comments in these places can sound authoritative even if the author has no medical training or expertise.

Top Health Sites

There are many excellent websites that provide reliable health and medical information, but one of the best all-purpose sites recommended by Consumer Reports for researching symptoms and medical conditions is MedlinePlus (medlineplus.gov).

MedlinePlus, a service of the National Library of Medicine, the world’s largest medical library and part of the National Institutes of Health, provides high-quality, trusted health and wellness information that is easy to understand and ad-free.

Here are some additional websites recommended by the Medical Library Association and others to help you find reliable information about specific diseases, symptoms, and treatments.

cancer: National Cancer Institute (cancer.gov), American Cancer Society (cancer.org), and National Comprehensive Cancer Network (nccn.org).

Heart disease: American Heart Association (americanheart.org), National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (nhlbi.nih.gov).

Diabetes mellitus: American Diabetes Association (diabetes.org).

Alzheimer’s disease: Alzheimer’s Association (alz.org) and Alzheimers.gov.

Public Health and Vaccines: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (cdc.gov).

Alternative medicine: the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (nccih.nih.gov) and the Office of Dietary Supplements at the National Institutes of Health (ods.od.nih.gov).

Before your doctor’s appointment, be sure to save or print out any online research you do, including the website where you got the information, so you can review it together with your doctor.

Questions about seniors can be sent to Savvy Senior, PO Box 5443, Norman, OK 73070, or visit SavvySenior.org Jim Miller is a contributor to the NBC Today show and author of “The Savvy Senior.”