With that said, I do have a very personal, intense dislike of bureaucracy and lack of common sense. So even though there are plenty of great websites and online resources offered by the US Government, there are also a whole lot of silly online sites as well. In some cases, the waste of resources is so blatant that US taxpayers should be outraged.

Entertaining Or “Educating” Children?

If you’re read the book 1984 by George Orwell, then you know how creepy it is to see any government in the world attempting to “educate” children. Visions of brainwashing and propaganda come to mind. Those of you that were students during the Cold War will remember the whole “Duck and Cover” campaign.

Well now that there’s terrorism, hurricanes and pandemic diseases to fear, the US Government is busy getting Americans “ready” for any catastrophe with Ready.gov. The creepiest part of the U.S. government site is the “Ready Kids” area that educates kids about all of the threats families can face and must be prepared for.

Yet another government agency that has no clue when it comes to communicating with children is the US Treasury. On the Treasury’s website for kids called TreasuryDirect Kids, you’ll find all sorts of explanations and definitions that no child younger than 18 would be likely to even understand.

It seems inconceivable to me that the folks putting together this page truly think it’s okay to use a phrase like “inflation-protected securities” on a website meant for small children to learn about the Treasury. I mean, seriously?

Then there’s the other extreme over at Census.gov, where the wonderful, intelligent folks that conduct the US Census figured they’d follow the trend of other government agencies and offer a section of their website for kids as well. There, kids will find a cute little game where they can….well….count things.

I don’t know – that just struck me as really funny.

Finally, one more website for older kids – college-aged kids to be exact – is a US Government website called CollegeDrinkingPrevention.org. While the concept is commendable, the entire premise of the website is just silly.

Yes, it is a great idea to educate college students about the dangers of drinking too much alcohol, but do you really think college students are going to visit a government website to watch goofy videos, or read a list of “Fact About Alcohol Poisoning?”

Silly & Wasteful Government Websites

Beyond the sites for kids, there are also lots of US Government websites intended for adults that are just as pointless and silly. One example, from the US Geological Survey is actually kind of scary. The USGS decided to provide a webpage where people could submit ideas about how to solve the Earth’s problem of over-population.

I’m actually afraid to learn what sort of “creative” suggestions people submitted to the USGS using the forms on this website.

Now, here’s a quick pop quiz. Do you know who prints US currency? The US Federal Reserve? The US Mint? No and no. It’s actually an obscure agency called the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

This website treats the production of US currency as though it’s some sort of business – complete with monthly production reports, and even an online store where you can buy limited edition currency. Seriously.

Then there’s probably the funniest government website of all, the Office of Government Ethics. It is the Office that comes up with the ethical rules and guidelines that politicians in the Executive Branch of government must follow.

Why is it such a funny site? Simple – because it’s one website that you can be sure most US politicians never visit.

Here’s pop-quiz #2: Do you remember Ronald Reagan’s famous “Star Wars” missile defense initiative? It was the talk of the day in the 1980s, and then as the years passed, you started to hear less and less about it. Well – just so you know – the entire initiative is alive and well in the Missile Defense Agency.

The Cold War may be over, but these folks at the DoD are working diligently on next generation interceptor missiles that can take out ballistic missiles. If you are looking to start your own ballistic missile business, the website has an entire “Business Opportunities” section, just for you.

The last site I wanted to cover is one that freaked me out a little bit. If you are a fan of Spongebob Squarepants (the popular children’s cartoon), then you may recall Plankton’s “evil plan Z” to take over the entire world. Well, the Department of Defense “Unified Command Plan” webpage looks to me like the US version of that plan.

You’ve got the “combatant commanders” covering each region of the world. It’s like one big world map of global domination.

Okay, maybe I’m being a bit sarcastic and overly critical of these websites. However, in all seriousness, is it really smart to be tossing money and resources into some of these government websites when there are so many major issues facing the country and the world? Shouldn’t the choice and development of government websites be at least a little bit more efficient and well thought out?

What’s your opinion about US Government websites, or some examples of silly government websites for your own country? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Photo credit: Boris15

But unless you are a member of the Congress, you can’t check out books. You can use the huge collection for reading and research. For those of us who have yet to experience something like the majestic Great Hall of the Thomas Jefferson Building, an online peek is the next best option.

Though it doesn’t come close to the real deal, the online website of the Library of Congress offers some nice free resources.

Take a Virtual Tour of the Library of Congress Online

The next best thing to actually being there, or something better than hearing someone rave about it. The Library of Congress gives you a virtual tour with the help of an iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad app. If you don’t own any of these, you can still go to the online site and catch the virtual tours. You just need to have Microsoft Silverlight installed for two of the interactives. The screenshot above is a tour of the Main Reading Room. Click on the red markers to learn all about the 16 magnificent statues.

There are host of other interactives. For instance, you can literally turn the pages of the Gutenberg Bible.

Play Knowledge Quest

Knowledge Quest is a historical trivia game that you can play on the MyLOC sub-site.  The interactive game is a great way to learn about the historical objects of interest in the library and also about history itself. The learning game has many levels and you can start from anywhere. It is a very useful resource for teachers and students and beautifully designed.

Listen to Podcasts

Downloadable podcasts forms an important audio resource on the Library of Congress Online. You can subscribe to the free podcasts and listen to them in your podcast player or iTunes. You can expect the podcasts to be of topnotch quality as they are presented by well-known novelists, historians, and narrators. Many podcasts are part of featured series audio presentations.

Watch Webcasts

If you are less of an audio guy and more for streaming videos, you won’t be disappointed as LOC has an entire section covering not only history but also more contemporary topics like environment, the Afghanistan conflict, weight loss etc. The entire American Memory video collection is listed alphabetically and it should take you the better part of your life to go through all of them. Typical maximum sizes are about 40 MB. Webcasts may require a Real Player plug-in. You will also find webcasts on iTunes U and then there’s the Library of Congress YouTube channel with 800+ uploads.

The Flickr ‘Commons’ Photostream

LOC runs a ‘Commons’ project where they provide access to a large number of historical photographs via Flickr. Some of the most famous photographs in the world (e.g. Migrant Mother) are part of these collections. Explore history visually. All photos are free from copyright restrictions and you can use them for any educational project.

Go Back Today In History

I had written about a few places where you can find out what happened today in history. The Library of Congress Today in History found a mention there. You can bookmark and visit it every day to get a sense of time.

Solve Today’s Science Mysteries

I bet you can’t answer all common everyday phenomena (How high can a nine-banded armadillo jump into the air?). Then you need to visit the neatly laid out Everyday Mysteries page along with a child and look up everything related to the strangeness in our sciences.

Read a Few Classics

The Library of Congress actively ties to promote literacy and good reading. The Lifelong Literacy section has interactive resources for kids, teens, students, educators, and adults. You can browse through books in a fun way using your Silverlight enabled browser. There are classic book titles and suggested titles for nourishing the reading habit. The above screen is from an interactive Story Book Adventure game.

Catch Exhibitions Online

When you can’t make the trip, why not catch a glimpse of the exhibitions in your browser. There’s something always going on and you can browse through the previous ones too. It is all very systematically laid out with multimedia resources and interactives (wherever available). The latest one is on I Love Lucy, the popular TV show.

The Virtual Reference Shelf

Exploring the library – even virtually – tires you out. There’s so much to click and browse. If you still have an appetite, head for the Virtual Reference Shelf. Here you will find a comprehensive list of external resources; from acronym finders to quotation sites…it’s a directory which you can keep bookmarked because the sources are collected with a strict eye for quality by the staff of LOC.

I have been browsing through the Library of Congress Online for the past few hours or so. I still have a sneaking hunch that I might have missed an important resource or two. If I have, do mention it in the comments. It could add something to our education and learning. Also, let us know if you have actually visited the Library of Congress? How was the experience?

Once you’ve decided what to write about, you need to make sure that you use the correct set of tools to express your idea to the readers. This includes tools to research the topic, to take screenshots, record screencasts, etc. You also need to make sure that your how-to is valid and doesn’t contain any mistakes. You can use the following set of awesome tools to get all those aspects in order.

Research Tools to Create a How To Guide

Google: The Grand-daddy of Research

You may have the best idea, but there’s really no point to create a how to guide unless you can back it up with material that is accurate, simple to understand and something that doesn’t intimidate the reader. You can use Google (or for that matter any good search engine) to learn about the subject.

If you are an expert on the subject, you may only need to look up a couple of definitions. In case you are a novice, you can head over to other blogs/websites to learn more about the subject that you want to teach your readers. Be innovative with your searches. Use the following strategies:

• Type exact phrases (e.g. How to delete the Recycle Bin from the Desktop): More often than not, such searches return very accurate results from reputable websites. Use quotation marks to narrow down your search further. See the screenshot below to understand how this helps.

  

• Use the define keyword: Every now and then, you will come across a term that’s frequently used in your how-to, but you can’t stitch together the perfect definition for it. Sometimes you may also be looking for a definition to kick-off your How-To. In such cases, you could use the define keyword in Google.

  

• Look deep: Sometimes, the resource you are looking for may be buried tens of thousands of links deep. All you need to do is make sure that you don’t get discouraged after the first three or four pages of results. If you don’t want to troll through tons of pages, you could even try your luck and click a result page randomly.

Organizing The Research

It’s one thing getting hold of all that you need to make your how-to rock. It’s quite another to organize and sort through the tons and tons of information that you now have at your disposal. We recommend that you use the following two tools to organize your research.

• Evernote: Evernote comes in a free as well as a paid avatar. The free version is generally enough to serve anyone’s research appetite. It installs really quickly and provides you with a place to clip your research and organize it into different notebooks. You can set up a capture hot-key or use the button that is installed into your toolbar to invoke Evernote. All your notes are automatically synced to the Evernote servers so your research is with you wherever you are.In the screenshot below, look at how Evernote has helped to organize research about stock trading. Furthermore, each individual note can be assigned Tags, and notes can then be searched by using these tags.

  

• Zotero: Zotero is a more Firefox-specific solution to research. Once you’ve installed Zotero into Firefox, you can go crazy with your research. Amongst other features, it lets you automatically capture citations, remotely sync your research, organize the research using collections and tags, and import/export to almost any application that can process text/images.Make sure you read our Zotero tutorial. You can also check out a video demonstrating Zotero on their website. The screenshots below show the Zotero library view, the center pane, and the Zotero editor for your notes.

  

Make It Interactive

Videos

Nobody wants to read boring, text-only accounts of how you used a small sheet of cardboard to forge a wallet for yourself. They would be more likely to watch a video of what you did. If you decide to include a video, make sure that it looks professional. Here are a few guidelines to go about the process:

• Use a camcorder. No, your iPhone’s camera doesn’t count
• Try to reach a balance between casual and formal. The video should feature language casual enough to keep the reader interested, yet retain the touch of professionalism that a hit video requires.
• Don’t use a million angles. Decide on a couple and stick to them.
• Zoom in on the subject. That’s your project we are referring to, not you!
• Care about the poor people who can’t afford expensive bandwidth. Make sure you have multiple editions of the video. You could have one at a low resolution, and another in higher quality.

Below, you see a couple of stills from how-to videos. No prizes for guessing which one is considered good, and which one is considered bad.

Make sure to check our list of 18 Online Tools To Mix, Edit, and Enhance Your Videos. You should also check out our Essential Video Tutorials for Shooting and Editing Video.

Screenshots

If the how-to is about something on your computer, it’s imperative that you provide an adequate number of screenshots. Remember that the entire world wasn’t blessed with your geekiness when they descended upon Earth. A screenshot here and there can go a long way to help your readers understand what you mean. A few guidelines to help you get started:

• Use proper, clear screenshots.
• Decide on a uniform width x height for your screenshots, and try your best to restrict your screenshots to those figures.
• Too many screenshots can be overkill too. Instead of providing a screenshot for every step (such as clicking on the start button), try covering only the most important steps in your screenshots. If it is impossible to eliminate any intermediate steps, try using a smaller screenshot, or use a screencast (more on this below).
• Learn from other websites. You can do so by simply paying attention to their screenshots. Start with how we provide screenshots on MakeUseOf — like in this article, for instance.

Below, you can see a few examples of screenshots. One is what’s considered a good screenshot, and the other is what would generally be regarded as poor. Let us assume that the how-to is about a feature within the Firefox menu. Notice how the good screenshot is very, very specific in nature, while the bad one tends to distract the user a lot.

Now that you know the ins and outs of creating screenshots, you can use our tried and tested applications for creating screenshots. Check out one of our articles here.

Screencasts

Screencasts are even better than screenshots. They basically combine the best advantages of videos and screenshots. You can literally walk your readers through the entire process by using a screencast. To get a better idea about what a screencast should look like, check out the video below.

Read up our article about 5 Free Screencasting Apps for Creating Video Tutorials to get going with screencasts.

Writing a How-To guide can be a major pain if you don’t have the correct tools at your disposal. However, with just a little bit of systematic organization, and a pinch of imagination, you can make your how-to really stand out and make a mark.

Image Credit: stock:xchng

When it’s all said and done, however, the time and effort you’ve put in will pay off. I doubt you’ll complain once you’re making six figures.

So who wants to go to law school? Not me, that’s for sure. But for those of you brave students who are actively pursuing this endeavor, I’m sure you could use a little help along the way. Now I can’t take your bar exam for you (not that you’d want me to) but I can give you a list of helpful websites and resources. Here at MakeUseOf we like to make things easy for you, so I have compiled this list of the best websites for law students for your reference. I hope you find them useful.

Law.com Dictionary

What better place to start than by brushing up on your legal definitions? Law.com’s dictionary is a comprehensive list of (probably) every legal term known to man. Each term is accompanied with its definition, respectively. This invaluable resource has everything from “˜a fortiori’ to “˜zoning’ covered. It is a page that I’m sure you will refer to again and again. Also, Law.com itself is a great place to get daily news and information regarding your field.

Advanced Advocates

“Advanced Advocates is the world’s first collaborative platform for law students. [It] is the only network in the world full of relevant content and features designed exclusively for law students.”

AA, as it is so aptly named, allows you to review case briefs in a user-friendly format, create/edit briefs with wiki functionality, and search for briefs by party names, subject, and authors. You can leave/review clerk ratings, share outlines, and hold case discussions. It also has group creation ability.

When signing up, AA does require a law school email address. This is so they can keep the site exclusive to law school students.

Justia

Justia provides legal resources for lawyers. Coincidentally, a lot of this information could be useful to law students (such as you) as well. Justia has a wealth of information, including legal practice, research, and the latest cases in the news. It also has an inclusive “˜blawg’ search that covers over a thousand law blogs.

Social Media Law Student

Speaking of blogs, Social Media Law Student is a pretty popular one. Their goal is “to connect lawyers with new technologies in hopes of making the practice of law easier”, and as far as I can tell they are the only ones doing this.

SMLS boasts a group of the most tech savvy law students, lawyers, and legal professionals as its contributors and appeals to anyone interested in law and technology. Articles cover the latest legal trends, technologies, apps, and social networking tools. They have received various awards and accolades for their efforts (this being one of them).

LawLink

Speaking of social networks (you see the pattern yet?), LawLink is “the first and largest social network for law professionals”. LawLink’s services include networking, public profile creation, a Twitter law forum, more than 100 law groups, the sharing of legal documents, a Q&A section, top news, forum creation, and a classified ads section.

Needless to say, it’s not hard to keep busy on LawLink. When you join you are automatically a member of your law school group. You must be a law student, attorney, expert witness, or law professional to join.

Additional Resources

If you’ve made it this far then you’re well on your way to becoming a successful law school graduate. Because you like to work hard””and are probably used to it””I have provided some extra reading for you. After all, good law student resources are hard to find. Trust me, I know. Here they are:

ESQChat Blogs

ESQChat is a forum in which you must be a practicing attorney to be a member of. Never mind that, because they have a pretty good collection of blogs for you to read on their Blog Categories page. You don’t have to be a member to view this page and it is host to 244 blogs in 42 categories as of this writing. You are sure to find some interesting content there.

In Propria Persona

In Propria Persona is a law and technology blog that has some pretty good information written from a personal perspective. The post ‘10 Alternative Legal Research Sites‘ caught my eye and is a prime example of some of the content you can find there.

100 Best Lifehacks for Law Students

I tried to think of a way to break down this list into a set of key articles for you to read, but I think that doing that yourself is half the learning experience. Some of the links are a bit dated, but there is some interesting tips, ideas, and help located there, all geared towards law students.

That’s it! I wish you the best of luck in law school and I hope you find these resources useful in your quest to become an attorney. If you have any useful sites or interesting comments, ideas, or concerns, please leave a comment below.

Image Credit: sbpp

It seems that many authors don’t realize that a good research manuscript requires more than consistent and complete data. The central challenge of everything you ever write is to capture the reader’s interest and convincingly tell your story. In other words, you must understand your audience, what they expect, what they already know or where you need to fill them in. When writing a research manuscript, however, you must also follow a standard structure and apply the principles of scientific writing.

The following sites explain how to write a research paper. They reveal the rules of scientific writing, give practical examples, and guide you through the entire process of preparing a successful research manuscript. Best of luck!

Overview

How to Write a Research Paper

This wikiHow page summarizes the single steps of how to write a research paper in a broad overview.

Your greatest obstacle may be that you’re feeling overwhelmed, which may result in never getting started. What you need to do is break up the project in small, managable steps. For a research paper that would be to decide on a topic, do your research, scan the material, formulate your thesis statement, write the paper, and finally format and proofread the manuscript.

All of these steps are equally important and difficult. The overview given at wikiHow is very general. Depending on what type of research paper you’re going to write, you may need more details and help. Pick your category below.

Students

A+ Research & Writing

This is a guide for high school and college students. It provides details, outside links, and a lot of background information for each step of writing a thesis.

In case you weren’t assigned a topic, you will find the chapter on Discovering and Choosing a Topic very helpful. The articles on Info Search, e.g. Learning to Research on the Web or Skills for Online Searching will aid you in finding information.

For students, this information should be sufficient. However, some of the advanced links, for example the Guidelines on Style, could answer further questions.

With all of its additional article, for example on citing sources, the above site is packed with information. If you can’t be bothered with reading that much, try the following reference site.

Infoplease Homework Center: How to Write a Research Paper

The article at Infoplease divides the process of writing a research paper into nine single steps. Each chapter contains further steps with straightforward instructions and clear examples. A wiki style menu makes it easy to jump back and forth between chapters.

In respect to formatting their work, students are relatively free. There may be guidelines, but they are hardly as specific or strict as those of professional journals or publishers.

Advanced

Working in academia, it’s necessary to regularly report about new findings, i.e. publish results. To be published, the manuscript must be submitted to a journal, be approved by the editor, pass through a peer-review process, eventually also through a revision, and finally be accepted by the editor. This process can be accelerated by submitting a well written manuscript. To be admitted into the review process it may even be more important to adhere exactly to the journal’s instructions to authors, which cover details about formatting, length of manuscript, accepted image files etc.

How to Write a Paper in Scientific Journal Style and Format

Bates College has published an incredibly thorough guide to writing scientific papers. The first chapter deals with scientific writing, followed by a chapter on how to go about writing the actual paper. Most useful, however, are the “How Do I Write the…” and “How Do I…” sections, that explain the different elements and conventions of a scientific paper.

The information compiled in this guide is comprehensive, but to the point. It’s not just full of advice and examples, but also provides handy lists, for example units and conversions for the metric system.

Many pages of the guide are available in PDF format. Look for the respective link at the top of each chapter page.

Guidelines on Style for Scientific Writing

Will G Hopkins wrote this article that goes into detail on scientific writing, addressing points such as punctuation, abbreviations and acronyms, use of words, and grammar.

Finally, Wikipedia has an article on scientific writing. While it contains a long list with examples and advice, it may be difficult to scan.

Scientific Writing Booklet

The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Arizona offers a free booklet as PDF download. You can download it here: Scientific Writing Booklet

This booklet is a pleasure to read and provides tons of lists and examples that are easy to understand and implement.

Wikipedia also has an article on Scientific writing, however, despite a wealth of information, it’s comparably difficult to scan.

The theoretic advice in these guides is invaluable. But how do you motivate yourself to actually sit down and start writing? What is your secret?

Image credits: Nic’s events

In this article, let us look at two online guides to check your illness symptoms online, which are extremely easy to use and provide information about probable causes.

Before we proceed, it is necessary to stress that these guides should not be used as a substitute for professional medical advice. It is better that you use these tools as a supplementary resource to get more information, while you may be waiting for your doctor’s appointment, or to learn more about certain illnesses.

Check Symptoms Online With WebMD Symptom Checker

Web MD Symptom Checker is an easy to use interactive tool, where you select specific symptoms and it identifies possible causes.

You start by selecting your gender and age, after which you can specify the symptoms in three ways in the left panel:

• You can identify the symptom by zooming in on the affected body part in the interactive map of the human body on the left.
• You can select from a list of 76 possible symptoms organized in an alphabetical list and a common symptoms list.
• You can search for symptoms using the search box.

If applicable, you can select and add more symptoms. Once you identify the symptoms, the Symptom Checker shows you a list of possible conditions that may be the cause of them. You can check more about any possible condition right within the Symptom Checker.

For each condition, Symptom Checker provides you with an overview, a list of all symptoms associated with that condition, and related articles and videos on the WebMD website.

Mayo Clinic Symptom Checker

Use this guide to discover the most common causes of the most common symptoms. The Mayo Clinic Symptom Checker takes a different approach to isolating possible conditions than the WebMD version.

You first select between Adult and Child symptoms on the first page. For Adults, there are 28 common symptoms listed. After you choose one kind of symptom, the next page lets you select related factors depending upon the selected symptom:

• Details such as persistent/intermittent, started suddenly/gradually, etc.
• Whether it affects both pairs of hands/legs/etc.
• Details of the pain ““ duration, pattern, severity, location
• Trigger factors such as injury, repetitive use, stress, change in sleeping pattern, etc.
• Relieving factors such as medication, rest
• Accompanying symptoms associated with the selected symptom

Note that this page is specific and different for each of the 28 symptoms listed in the first page. The questions on this page are similar to what a doctor would ask you after you tell him about a symptom. So the process actually feels similar to an actual diagnosis!

After you make the appropriate selections on this page, the next one gives you possible causes of the symptoms. Here, you can see all associated factors or symptoms related to this condition.

Clicking on the condition takes you to the main page for it on the Mayo Clinic website. Here, you will find a wealth of information and resources such as description, causes, risk factors, tests and diagnosis, treatment and drugs, home and alternative remedies, prevention, etc.

For more health-related articles, check out our health category.

Did you find these tools useful? Any other online illness guide that you prefer? Tell us in the comments!

I guess that got me to thinking,  “If I found a pill in my kid’s bedroom, how would I go about figuring out what it is?” I suppose the easiest answer is to just ask them. But easy doesn’t make for a good article. My quest began.

I found three really interesting free sites to identify prescription drugs, and one that is free…but only to medical professionals and students. Let’s take a look at them, shall we?

Drugs.com

The layout of this site is very nice. I can figure out exactly how to do what I want. I can identify unknown drugs, find out more about them and see what they might not interact with very well.

First I hit the Pill Identifier. Ha! The first line in the text reads, “Worried about those capsules you found in your teenager’s room?” Apparently I’m not the only paranoid and invasive parent out there. Let’s see what turns up.

I’m just going to give it some random information to work with and see what happens. I gave it the parameters of maroon and round. Hmmm….3 results. Docusate sodium-senna, Marinol, and Phenazopyridine hydrochloride. 2 of the 3 came with pictures which would help me to further verify what the pill is. Let’s look at Marinol.

You can go further to find out what the drug does. Aha! Check this out. “Dronabinol is a man-made form of cannabis (marijuana is an herbal form of cannabis).” I knew the little punk was up to no good. Wait ’til he gets home from school. Oh, yes, this is a hypothetical story. Sorry about that. Got a little carried away.

There are other fine features on this site to help you answer your questions about drugs. You can go through a list of drugs from A to Z, search for drugs based on the condition they treat, and of course, there is a community which you can join to interact with other people interested in how drugs interact with their health.

RxList

RxList does pretty much the same thing as Drugs.com, but in a bit different way. In addition to the ability to identify unknown drugs and identify prescription drugs based on the condition they treat, RxList also adds informational slideshows and a pharmaceutical dictionary to help you understand some of those fifty-cent words.

Lets take a look at RxList’s pill identifier and see what more trouble I can get my hypothetical teenage son into. Odd, maroon is not a listed colour. Well, let’s try red and round. Phreaky pharmacy Batman! There are 50 results ranging from over-the-counter medicines like Acetominophen to the anti-depressant Wellbutrin. Yet, Marinol isn’t listed. Hmm. Well, we can conclude that using both of these sites is going to give us a better chance of identifying that mysterious pill.

The RxList search results don’t show pictures for each pill either. That could make narrowing it down a little more difficult as well. In order to see a picture of the drug, you have to click on it’s name, then when the drug information page comes up, you need to click on another link to see the images – if there are any.

Overall, it’s still a very good resource.

PDRHealth

The real-world book, the Physicians Desk Reference (PDR), is now online. Unfortunately, the service costs a fair bit of money to access. Fortunately, it is free to access for medical professionals and students within the United States of America.

The PDR is the defacto standard for helping doctor’s and nurses find out all they need to know about almost any drug in existence. Yes, it uses a lot of medical jargon, so it may take a while to understand if you are not so inclined. Nonetheless, if you can break the code of medicalese, there is so much to be learned from this online tome.

However, Thomson Publishing has put together a bit of a layman’s site for those that want to find out more about what they are putting in their gullets everday. It isn’t quite as extensive as RxLink or Drugs.com, but, like all good research, it is another resource to help you confirm or deny what you are learning.

It is kind of nice that they breakdown medicines into three categories though: prescription, over-the-counter, and herbal medicines. Herbals aren’t specifically identified on the previous two sites.

PDRHealth does go beyond just medicines and looks at surgery and clinical trials as well. All are apart of a well-managed health care plan, in my opinion.

Hopefully, this breakdown will help you to be more involved in managing your health care and starting conversations about drugs, both good and bad, with your family. After all, it’s just like that six-inch philosopher GIJoe said, “Knowing is half the battle!”

What medical websites do you look at?    Here’s ones that Jackson recommends.