Maggie, the PubMed link should work for anyone, as the National Library of Medicine opened it up to the whole Web a few years ago. However, it's of limited use to most people who don't have access to a medical research library that carries the journals being cited, although sometimes you can get the gist of the article from its abstract.

Folks, I work at NIH, and can get the full articles for almost all the citations - BUT - I am not a doctor, and the majority of the articles are written BY medical researchers FOR other medical researchers in their particular subspecialty, and are basically unintelligible to anyone outside their field (including me).

For us average Joes, sites like WebMD are better, because they explain the medical terms. The NLM also runs a more consumer oriented site called MedlinePlus. For folks looking for info about cancer, another good site is run by the National Cancer Institution, and is called www.cancer.gov (an official government cancer??). For other illnesses, there is frequently a patient advocacy organization that will provide Web links to reputable sites - here are a few.

And that's the problem with looking for health info on the Internet - as with almost any Web research project, you have to Know Your Sources. Try to stick to sites run by large teaching hospitals or medical research institutes. If you look for info on alternative medical treatments, try to double check the advice by seeing if there are any discussions of the approach by reputable scientific sources - search PubMed (even if the resulting citations are hard to understand, they show someone's actually testing the claims for a given treatment). NIH now has a Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine which is FINALLY funding controlled studies of herbal medicines and alternative therapies. They have a good link to databases about dietary supplements and other similar topics here.