Consumers United for Evidence-Based Healthcare (CUE)A coalition of consumer organizations that incorporate scientific evidence into their advocacy activities. The U.S. Cochrane Center, the scientific partner of CUE, is one of 12 Centers around the world that support contributors to the Cochrane Collaboration in producing systematic reviews of the effects of medical treatments. Free access to the abstracts and plain language summaries of all Cochrane reviews, as well as an online course called “Understanding Evidence-Based Healthcare: A Foundation for Action.”

Environmental Working Group evaluates a wide range of foods and consumer products—from sunscreens to cellphones—to determine whether they are safe for you as well as the environment.

HealthNewsReview.org evaluates and grades news stories by leading U.S. news organizations. Its goals are to improve the accuracy of news stories about medical treatments, tests, products and procedures and to help consumers evaluate the evidence for and against new ideas in health care. In more than four years, the project has reviewed more than 1,000 stories. At this point, about 70 percent of stories fail to adequately discuss costs or to quantify benefits and harms.

Influenza and Influenza Vaccines
Tom Jefferson, MD, international expert on the research supporting flu vaccines, blogs about this topic in English and Italian.

Medline Research Medical Database
The National Library of Medicine has made its medical database, Medline, available to the public at no charge! You can do subject searches, as well as access the abstracts of articles published in hundreds of medical journals.

Medscape
Visit the only peer-reviewed on-line medical journal for up-to-date information on health and medical research.

U.S. Consumer Gateway
This Web site has access to multiple federal consumer information resources and contains information contributed by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Federal Trade Commission, Food and Drug Administration, and many more government agencies.