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Consumer Health Resources

This guide was created for patrons looking for general consumer health information.

Not finding what you are looking for?

Not finding what you are looking for?

If you are finding that your knowledge surpasses what is available through most consumer health sites and books and you feel ready to tackle in-depth information written for health professionals, try searching some medical textbooks and journal articles.

Still can't find what you're looking for? Contact us at library@cchs.ua.edu.

Advanced Health Information

Advanced Health Information

PubMed is also available at PubMed.gov for those that are not affiliated with the University of Alabama.

Tips:

Once you do your search, look over to the left hand side of the page. There you can choose to narrow down your results:

  • Languages lets you choose only English-language articles. To see the English filter you need to choose "Show additional filters", check the box by Languages, and click the show button. You can then click on English to filter results, or choose Customize... to filter by other languages.
  • Article types: Meta-Analysis will give you the highest level of medical evidence. These will be summaries or reviews of all the evidence based literature known on a topic. If no meta-analyses are available, you may wish to search for Clinical Trials or  Randomized Control Trials to see if any clinical studies exist on your topic. If you get nothing with these filters, you can try searching for just Reviews or Practice Guidelines.
  • Full Text of articles: UA affiliates will see the Full Text buttons near the abstracts of articles to which we have available through journals we subscribe to. You may be asked to input your Net ID and password. For others who are not UA affiliates, the left hand side of your results page shows a category of Text Availability. Choose "Free full text available" to see only the free articles. For articles that are not free, you are welcome to come into the Health Sciences Library in person to download the full text of medical journal articles on selected resource computers. 

Alternatively, if you are not a UA affiliate you may wish to use PubMed Central, a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature. PubMed Central works very similar to PubMed, but the full-text of results are all freely available and some of the options for filtering results are different.

eBooks

Search the Health Sciences Library eBook catalog:

For more info on our eBooks collections, check out our eBook guide!