Top 4 Resources to Improve Your Medical Knowledge

We're a few years into a global pandemic, and although things are starting to look hopeful, misinformation on health, healthcare, and diseases have likely never been this prevalent. Knowledge of the human body and diseases may be viewed by some as only something that doctors should worry about, but in reality, it's something we should all have foundational knowledge of. After all, it's your body! Understanding your body, how it works, and how it interacts with the world is something we should all be comprehensively taught in school.

Better late than never, right? You can't become a doctor just from reading and watching a few online courses, but what you can do is learn health, healthcare terms, and how your body interacts with the world. By understanding the fundamentals, you'll be able to "speak health", and be able to understand the difference between scientific evidence and misinformation, which unfortunately, is all over the internet.

We've designed this list a bit differently than other lists. This article will help you understand where to begin your journey towards "speaking health", and although I really don't like that phrase, it's very important! Learning health is only one half of the battle, the other half being knowing where to find accurate, scientific information. So, we're going to discuss two things: where to learn health science knowledge, and learning where to find good information.

1. Medical Terminology - EdX

I'll be honest, this seems like quite a boring start to an interesting topic. But it's incredibly important to understand the fundamental core of an often misunderstood field of study.

This course covers the origin of a number of medical terms, and discusses a number of terms associated with anatomy, physiology, pathology, and diagnostic tests. While many might not find this topic exciting, courses like this achieve an important goal: helping people communicate health and healthcare terms properly. You'll learn to apply medical terms properly, which will help you accurately consume health-related news, which some people may interpret incorrectly due to a lack of knowledge.

If you not only want to learn medicine, but fundamentally understand it, this course is an important first step!

• Price: Free
• Paid Option : Yes
• What the paid option offers: Verified certificate, and graded assignments and exams
• Difficulty Level: Beginner
• Flexible schedule: Yes, but must be completed before stated deadline

Who should take this course? This is course is geared towards students studying Life Sciences, but no previous knowledge of health is necessary. If you want to learn where medical terminology comes from and if you want to be exposed to important health terminology, you should take this course.

Link to the course - Medical Terminology

2. The Challenges of Global Health - Coursera

We regularly hear about challenges of global health in the News - hunger, disease, antibiotic resistance, reproductive health in developing countries, collapsing health care systems, the list goes on.. how do academics look at these issues and find solutions?

Well, solutions are often very difficult to come by, and aren't as easy as they may seem on paper. For example, we're often told that we should donate food to developing countries. How do we ensure that the food we are donating actually reaches the hungry? What if it isn't transported properly, and rots? What if bad actors intercept the food, and it doesn't ever reach the people who need it most?

Many of these issues are very complicated with no clear solution, and this course provides an academic overview of many of these issues. In addition, it discusses many basic concepts that will help you better understand and discuss these issues.

This course covers a ton of topics, and covers them indepth enough to give you solid knowledge of each topic. It's well worth the time if you are interested in learning global health.

• Price: Free
• Paid Option : Yes
• What the paid option offers: Verified certificate and graded assignments
• Difficulty Level: Beginner
• Flexible schedule: Yes

Who should take this course? This is a good option for complete beginners who want to learn about a variety of global health issues, and the important concepts behind them all. This course is quite comprehensive while still being consise, given the amount of content it contains.

Link to the course - The Challenges of Global Health

3. Global Health eLearning Center

This item is a bit different, since it contains a number of short courses in a variety of global health areas! If you'd like to dive deeper into individual subjects, such as Antimicrobial resistance, health communication, health data statistics, globalhealthlearning.org has the solution for you. They have a large variety of subjects, and you are free to choose the ones that interest you the most. They review their courses fairly regularly, so you should feel confident knowing you are studying relevant, peer reviewed material.

• Price: Free
• Paid Option : Yes
• What the paid option offers: Certificate Programs (although, all courses within these programs are free)
• Difficulty Level: Beginner, but possibly more difficult depending on the course
• Flexible schedule: Yes

Who should take this course? This is a good option for those working in healthcare, or those who want to gain knowledge in specific global health areas. There are a variety of courses, and you are free to choose the one(s) you are most interested in studying.

Link to the course - Global Health eLearning Center

4. Advanced Literature Searching in the Health Sciences - EdX

Interpreting academic literature feels like a steep learning curve. Finding good research, understanding academic terminology, deciphering research methods..

Don't worry, consuming academic literature is a skill that must be learned and practiced, just like anything else. The key benefit of reading academic literature is that you're reading primary sources, directly from researchers who are an expert in their field. This is where knowledge comes from, and this is how we grow our knowledge of the world.

This course focuses on the important of literature in health sciences, how to search academic literature properly, and best practices to ensure you are finding literature relevant to your searches. A must for anyone in post-secondary or graduate studies, but equally as important for the general public who read about science in the news, and want to know how to confirm whether the science actually exists or not, or whether the writer has an alternate agenda.

For example, it's quite easy to find "scientific" blog posts on the internet that say vaccines cause autism, and that there's decades of research supporting this. Okay.. scary. But how can you confirm if this is true? Well, let's look for this "evidence" on sites that publish research, like Pubmed, a repository of scientific studies published by many journals. By searching the literature, you'll quickly find that actual science says the exact opposite: there is no link between vaccines and autism. This article is a meta-analysis that looked at many other studies, none of which showed a link. The article is not free to read without access, like through a university (many libraries also support access to academic research, for free). However, there are many free research articles out there refuting the claim that vaccines cause autism, such as this one published in 2022. I looked through the research as I wrote this, and in fact, there is absolutely no evidence suggesting that vaccines cause autism. A bit of digging shows that the only "published evidence" was a fraudulent, now retracted 1998 study by Andrew Wakefield. This study was retracted after a reporter discovered financial conflicts of interests, and since no academics have ever repeated these findings, it is highly likely that he only published this study for unethical financial gain. His medical license has since been revoked, but he's still a strong anti-vaccine activist pushing his proven-false claims, even though there's clear evidence he fabricated evidence for financial gain.

So, do you see the need for academic research? And the need to understand where to find evidence? And of course, the need for people to interpret and criticize primary sources correctly. If you see a claim on the internet, do you believe it without question? There is so much information on the internet, that it would be too time consuming to fact check every single thing we read. Many of us may believe in things that are not scientifically proven, without even realizing it. Personally, I used to fall for exercise supplement marketing gimmicks (i'll admit to a lot of bad purchases for the sake of my health), then I learned that in many contries, supplement company's often grandeur claims are not well regulated, and they can often make claims that are not true. Or, at the very least, vague claims (e.g. "may help you lose 5 lbs per week!") even though these claims are basically meaningless.

The internet is full of information, and knowing how to fact-check is a crucial skill for any curious individual. Medicine and Health are areas where our only valid knowledge is backed by science, so if you want to see if there's any evidence to back up a claim you read or heard about, this course will teach you to fact check.

• Price: Free
• Paid Option : Yes
• What the paid option offers: Certificate Programs (although, all courses within these programs are free)
• Difficulty Level: Beginner to Intermediate
• Flexible schedule: Yes

Who should take this course? This is a good option for those studying a health science field, or anyone who wants to learn how to verify medical/health claims they read or hear about. While not the most flashy subject, the importance of knowing how to research primary sources cannot be emphasized enough. This is the most important skill you can have in any scientific field.

Link to the course - Advanced Literature Searching in the Health Sciences

What's Next?

Health Sciences, Healthcare, and Medicine are areas that have decades, sometimes centuries of research to confirm or deny our current understanding of health. We are living in the age of information, where all of this research is at our fingertips! Keep in mind that science isn't about proving anything, rather, it's about finding the best evidence to support a research question.

Since there are so many different medical areas, we recommend choosing several that you are passionate about, and doing your own research. For example, what questions are people asking in Neuroscience? What are some recent breakthroughs? Read the studies of these breakthroughs, are the research methods solid?

Some of these questions are hard for beginners to answer, but asking these questions is key to understanding how and why the scientific method works. Like anything, this takes practice.

Final Thoughts

There's a misconception that medical knowedge is reserved for the smartest students who've completed years of med school. We live in an age of vastly available information, so this couldn't be further from the truth! Doctors are those who have passed med school, and have proven to be competent care providers and researchers. Nonetheless, we can and should do our own research into medicine, no matter who we are.

Even with the vast amounts of information out there, it's still important to be skeptical and ask questions. If we are doing our own research, how do we know if we are finding accurate information? How do we know that research isn't being performed with secret, financial motives rather than a search for scientific truth? It's sometimes hard to know this, but we should still make a strong effort to seek good information. We all have the power to do our own research (that includes reading research by others), and with a bit of time and effort, we can separate good medical knowledge from pseudoscience.

If knowledge is power, then knowing where to find knowledge is a superpower.