Health information is everywhere. It is on the news, on social media, in adverts, and from friends and family. Some of it is excellent. Some of it is wrong, and some of it is designed to sell you something.

In this lesson, you will learn how to tell good information from poor information, how to understand the medical words your doctor or pharmacist might use, and how to walk into your next appointment with a clear list of questions.

Warm-up question: Think about the last time you looked up a health question. Where did you look? Did you trust what you found? You will come back to this thought as the lesson goes on.

Before evaluating health information, here are four ideas that come up again and again. The table below explains each one in plain English, with a short example.

This is the main part of the lesson. You will work through four short sections:

1. Learn the credibility checklist for judging any health claim.
2. See the checklist applied to a worked example.
3. Decode some medical jargon into plain English.
4. Build your own question list for your next GP, pharmacist, or specialist appointment.

Take your time. You can pause between sections if you need a break, and you can come back to Section 4 (your question list) after the session if you run out of time. The list is yours to keep and add to.

Pause for a moment with these prompts. You do not need to type anything. Just consider them, alone or with someone you trust.

If you would like to take this further, here are two optional challenges:

• Read a medicine leaflet. Take the patient information leaflet from any medicine in your home. Find the sections on 'side effects' and 'when not to take'. See how much you can decode using the credibility checklist and the jargon table. Anything you cannot work out becomes a question for your pharmacist, who can answer for free.
• Practise the plain-English question. Next time you watch a news item or advert about health, listen out for jargon. Pause and try to translate it into plain English in your own words. The more you do this, the more natural it becomes.

Both of these are small habits that, over time, make you a much more confident reader of health information.