Where does one go for useful medical and health information these days at 1 AM in the morning? Don’t call Dr Benson Yeung, he is either sleeping or hubbing, or sleep-hubbing. Call upon Dr Google or Dr Yahoo, or click open this particular hub. The information you need will be just at your finger tips. Here are some of the more popular websites for medical information:

WebMD (webmd.com),

Discovery Health (health.discovery.com),

The New York Times Health (nytimes.com/health) and

Mayo Clinic(mayoclinic.com) offer good basic reading in lay terms and quick answers.

If you’re into high level medical evidence and cut-edge medical research findings, try the following:

PubMed from the National Library of Medicine (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed),

Clinical Trials (clinicaltrials.gov) and if you prefer alternative medicine,

National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (nccam.nih.gov).

If you’re looking for patient group sites, you may want to refer to

Association of Cancer Online Resources (acor.org) and

e-patients (e-patients.net).

There are also condition-oriented sites:

The American Heart Foundation (americanheart.org),

The American Cancer Society (cancer.org) (this one is my absolute favorite for simple-to-understand descriptions) and the very well written site of

The American Diabetes Association (diabetes.org).

Whatever your style and preference, don’t try to buy prescription drugs without prescriptions (what a mouthful) on-line. You can be making a wrong self-diagnosis, prescribing yourself the wrong drug, the right drug at the wrong dosage or, the right drug at the right dosage but given a fake drug. Whatever you do, believe me, don’t try this. It’s simply not worth the risk.