Search Help

• Category descriptions
• How to search
• Refining your search
• Not sure of spelling
• Viewing search results

Category descriptions

Articles are organized by categories. Below are descriptions of each category:

• Diseases and Conditions - major medical topics like diabetes and arthritis.
• Doctor's Views - medical and health opinions written by our doctors.
• Health Features and More updates in the health and medical fields.
• Health News - daily news articles from the health and medical field.
• Medical Dictionary - online medical reference that contains easy-to-understand explanations of medical terms.
• Medications - the most common prescription and over-the-counter medications, side effects, and drug interactions.
• Procedures and Tests - medical procedures and tests where our doctors' explain how and why the procedures are done.
• Related Information - reference articles related to a topic.
• Symptoms and Signs - common symptoms and signs helpful in evaluating the causes of health problems and in monitoring the status of diagnosed diseases.

How to search

Enter your keyword or phrase in the search box (located directly above) and click the Search button. The Search Results page will display:

• Total number of articles found on MedicineNet;
• Total number of articles in each category, the top 4 MedicineNet results and the drill down link (see below for category descriptions);
• And in some cases, a Doctors' Recommended Search Results with a link to a related center that has a carefully compiled list of related articles our Doctors have selected on the subject.

Refining Your Search

You can search by an exact phrase (one-word or multiple-words) or a combination of multiple keywords.  For example:

• to search for the articles that include the exact phrase, type:  "heart attack" (include quote marks for exact phrase)
• to search for articles where all the keywords are present, type: heart attack
• to search for articles that include both words, type: heart and attack
• to search for articles that include at least one of two words, type: heart or attack
• to search for articles that include combination of words, type: attack near heart
• to search for articles using the beginning of the word, type: hear* (use the wild card character asterisk)

Search is NOT case sensitive so any combination of small and capital letters will work.

Search will ignore any non-letter and non-numeric characters like ' or - and, possibly the rest of the word that includes those characters. For example, instead of searching for "children's", it will search for "children" which will include articles with "children's".

Not Sure of the Spelling?

If you're not sure of the spelling, type the first few letters, followed by an asterisk(*). For example if you type: asp*, the results will display articles that include the word asperger, aspirin, and aspartame.

View All The Results (Drill Down) Within Categories

Each category See all link drills down and lists all the articles found in that category. This drill down page displays 20 results on each page. You can scroll through all the pages in the category drill down by clicking the Next Page >> link or a page number link. Each result found is ranked by relevancy. The results that have the same ranking will display in alphabetical order. You can go to the complete list page by clicking the Back to Search Summary Page link.