Searching for information on BestTreatments

You can use the Search box at the top of every page to search through all the pages on BestTreatments. But it can be difficult to think of the best words or phrases to search for.

Here are some tips to help you search for information on BestTreatments.

• Imagine several words that should be on the page you're looking for, then type them in the Search box. Type AND (in capital letters) between the words. The more words you include, the more exact the results you will get. For example, if you search for breast AND cancer AND chemotherapy, you will get only pages that include all three of the words breast, cancer and chemotherapy. You won't get pages that contain only one of these words. Remember that if you search for too many words you may get nothing.
• If you want to search for a specific phrase, put double quotation marks around the phrase. So if you want to look for pages that mention heart attack and aspirin, type "heart attack" AND aspirin in the Search box.
• It doesn't matter whether you use capital letters or lower-case letters for the words you search for. The search will find them all.
• When you get the results of your search, they are listed in order of how often your words appear on each page. You may have to look down the list to find the pages you want.
• If you want to look for several similar words, use the * character. So searching for surg* will find pages that mention surgery or surgical.
• If you want to cast a wide net, just list several words without using AND between them. That will find any page that contains any one of those words. So if you search for pain ache soreness, you'll find pages that mention any one of pain, ache or soreness. Another way to do this is to put OR (in capitals) between each word or phrase.
• If you're getting too many results and want to ignore pages with a certain word on them, use the word NOT (in capitals) to block that word. So searching for skin NOT melanoma will find all the pages that mention skin except the ones that also mention melanoma.
• Some words, such as 'treatment' or 'condition', are so common on BestTreatments that it might not be helpful to search for them. Try to think of more precise terms that matter to you, such as 'chemotherapy' or 'complications'.
• Here are a few more ways you can improve your search. The question mark (?) character can be used in place of a single letter (l?ving will find both living and loving). The tilde (~) character placed after a word will find words similar in spelling (blood~ will find bleed). To find two words only when they occur close together on a page, such as within 10 words of each other, use this style: "breast tumour"~10. Finally, you can use brackets to group parts of a search together to make it clearer. For example: (nerve OR neuron) AND brain.