Many of us have searched the web for information regarding medical conditions. If you haven't used PubMed, you should try it.
PubMed is a database of peer-reviewed scientific articles which are mostly health-related in scope. It's maintained by the National Library of Medicine, a division of the National Institutes of Health.
The important adjective describing the articles is "peer-reviewed." Peer review is the process through which a scientific article must go before it's published. The peers or scientists are chosen by the editors of a journal for their expertise in the article's field of study. When peers are given an article to review, they can accept the article for publication, return it to the authors for further study, or outright reject it. That way the scientific community polices itself and only studies which are scientifically sound become published. This is different from articles which are published without peer review - like most articles on the web (including this one).
This is what's so great about PubMed: these peer-reviewed articles are available to everyone. Actually, the titles and the abstracts of the peer-reviewed articles are readily available to everyone. Some journals make their articles available for free but this is the exception rather than the rule. Full articles which aren't free can be retrieved at local medical libraries or by direct contact with the publisher. Direct contact with the publisher usually means paying for the article(s) of interest. So they're still available; they're just not freely available.
But that's okay. Most of the articles contain stuff which is tricky for the layperson to understand and the abstract is enough to understand what the authors concluded. The abstract is a short paragraph describing the study and its outcome. It's usually all one needs to find an answer to a question.
Reading abstracts can take practice but it's so worth it. You can read the source or you can rely upon popular news outlets to summarize a scientific study for you. It's similar to reading a book or watching a movie about the book: you can read the book and be free to interpret it as you like or you can watch the movie and let someone else interpret some of it for you. Remember, it's okay to do both.
PubMed: Part 2 will describe how to use PubMed's advanced search functions.