MedlinePlus Tutorial 4: How to Best Use the Search Box on MedlinePlus

Welcome to the video tutorial: "How to Best Use the Search Box on MedlinePlus." This video is for you, the Community Health Worker. It shares about a great, reliable website, where you can find health information. This video shares about how to best use the search box in that great website. It's called MedlinePlus. When you use this one website, you can be confident that you are sharing health information that is accurate and reliable. They have already done the research for you, and gathered the information that you need. Did you know that every MedlinePlus page has a search box that you can use? You can find it in the upper right hand corner. When you use the search box on the homepage, or any other page, you can search for information that is part of MedlinePlus. It does not search the internet. It searches only inside MedlinePlus, which is a trustworthy resource. As you start typing in the search box, you'll notice a word, or words, showing up. These are topics included in MedlinePlus. You can go ahead and select, or you can just keep typing in your words, and search. For example, let's type in "high blood pressure." As I type, you can see various words showing up under the search box, such as "high blood pressure medicines", "high blood pressure - children" Depending on what you are searching for, you may want to select one of these, or you can just click the "go" button and see what shows up. Let's say we just type in "high blood pressure" in the search box and click on the "go" button. Please note that the search box is not case sensitive. You can write using capital letters, or lowercase. Here you see search results similar to what you see when you do an internet search. Over 3000 results. But know that these results are from within MedlinePlus, and that means the information is trustworthy. 3000+ results is a lot to look through. You can scroll through these results, or you can look at "refine by format" to save you some time. Let's take a look on the left, called "Refine by Format." Here it shows you if it is a PDF document an image, or a video. Right next to each format it tells you how many results are available in that format. So let's say you want information in a PDF sheet. Click on that, and it will take you to a list of documents. You can scroll, and decide which one best meets your needs. For more information about searching, visit the MedlinePlus search tips webpage. By going from the MedlinePlus home webpage, click on the link "About MedlinePlus" which is located just under the search box. Click on "Using MedlinePlus" on the lefthand side of the webpage. And then click on "Search Tips." Here you will see some helpful tips to improve your searches using MedlinePlus.