Preventative Services Resources

More About Preventative Services

The content in this section and from all other sources are intended to provide guidance only. The decisions for your health are best made between you and your physician. The sources for the content were gathered from the most up to date and trusted sources from national experts. Most of the content was taken directly from these sites and only edited where we needed to make it easier to understand and match the different content styles. A description of these sites is included below. You can always find easy to read health information throughout MUSC Health as well. As always, ask your physician and health care team questions if you would like more information or would like an explanation.

United States Preventative Services Task Force

The primary source for recommendations and clinical guidelines included here is the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF). The USPSTF is an independent panel of experts in primary care and prevention who systematically reviews the evidence of effectiveness and develops recommendations for clinical preventive services. These reviews are published as USPSTF recommendations on the Task Force Web site and/or in peer-reviewed journals.

Getting the best health care means making smart decisions about preventive services. Preventive services, such as screening tests, counseling services, and preventive medicines, are tests or treatments that your doctor or others provide to prevent illnesses before they cause you symptoms or problems. To help doctors and patients decide together whether a preventive service is right for a person’s needs, the USPSTF develops recommendations based on a review of high-quality scientific evidence. 

The goal of these recommendations is not only to offer guidance to doctors, nurses, and other primary care professionals, but to provide patients and their families with the most accurate and up-to-date information on ways to prevent illness and improve health and well-being. These materials are designed to inform people about Task Force recommendations and are not intended to replace advice from a health professional.

HealthFinder.gov

Healthfinder.gov, is a government website where you will find information and tools to help you and those you care about stay healthy.

When making decisions about your health, it’s important to know where to go to get the latest, most reliable information. Healthfinder.gov has resources on a wide range of health topics selected from approximately 1,400 government and non-profit organizations to bring you the best, most reliable health information on the Internet.

We invite you to review the quality guidelines to learn more about how resources on healthfinder.gov are reviewed and selected. Healthfinder.gov is supported solely by U.S. government funds and does not accept paid advertisements, content, or links in any form.

National Heart Lung & Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health

In order to reach the broadest possible audience, the NHLBI releases health information in a variety of formats such as fact sheets, pamphlets, and online publications. If you are looking for information about a particular disease or how to reduce your risk of getting a disease being investigated by the NHLBI, please visit the online health resources pages as well as the NHLBI Health Topics. 

Center for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC)

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention's Health Topics A to Z provides links to CDC pages for hundreds of disease and health topics, including most of those falling under the purview of the NHLBI. It is not a complete index of the CDC site, but provides consumer-friendly information on a variety of topics.