Sometimes, making a choice about treatment is straightforward and you feel comfortable with the choices you're offered. At other times, the decision is harder and you may need more information to choose the right treatment.
There is a lot of information about treatments on the internet and elsewhere, but not all of it is accurate or up to date. How can you find out what you need to know?
NHS Choices
The NHS Choices website is a good place to start. The Health A-Z includes NHS-accredited information on hundreds of conditions and their treatment, and has links to more detailed information on both. The information on NHS Choices is based on the latest reviews of all the evidence, not just single studies that may not give the full picture.
All the articles in Health A-Z are approved by a clinician, usually an expert in the subject, before they are put online. The information is reviewed regularly and the date when it was last reviewed appears at the end of each article, so you can see that it's up to date.
Other good sources of information on treatments have similar ways of making sure that the information they provide is up to date and accurate.
Charities and patient groups
Many of the links on NHS Choices are to charities and patient groups that give detailed medical and clinical information. Groups such as Diabetes UK, CancerHelp or the mental health charity Mind are all committed to providing good-quality information on treatments. As well as online information, many charities operate phone helplines that can direct you to the information you need. Helplines are open during office hours and include:
Blogs, forums and online communities
Most of the main patient groups and charities run online forums, where people with the same condition discuss their treatment and other aspects of their illness. Blogs and forums provide a safe environment to share personal experiences of treatment choices.
While blogs and forums can be hugely supportive, other people's experiences will not necessarily be the same as yours, so don't make them the only source of information on which you base your treatment decisions. See Useful links, right, for a selection of forums.
You can hear about people's experiences of treatments at healthtalkonline. There are interviews with people who have various conditions, so you can find out why different people chose their treatment and how their treatment went.
Patient information from NICE
The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) provides information aimed at the public on treatments, which it publishes at the same time as its guidelines for health professionals. These guidelines summarise the latest evidence and guide the NHS on which treatments to use. The patient summaries can be downloaded from the NICE website.
When searching for information about treatments, you may come across conflicting information and advice. This can be confusing and it can be difficult to know who to believe. If a source of information on treatments tries to sell you something or promises something that seems too good to be true, treat it with caution. If the information comes from one individual who had a particularly good or bad experience of a treatment, don't assume that you will have the same experience. Only the experience of hundreds or thousands of people in research studies can give a full and rounded picture of the effects of a treatment.
Many of the stories that appear in newspapers and online about health don't tell the whole story, partly because they don't have the space to do so. NHS Choices' Behind the Headlines, which looks at the science behind the news, is useful in giving a more balanced view.
If, after finding out some information for yourself, you're still unsure about your treatment choices, talk to your doctor.
