About IM General

IM General exists to answer the unglamorous questions adults have about internal medicine before and after a doctor's visit: what the letters and job titles mean, how screening recommendations are graded, where the official version of a drug label lives, and what to bring to an appointment so the visit time gets spent on you rather than on reconstructing your history.

It is written for a general United States audience — patients, family caregivers, and anyone helping an older relative navigate appointments and paperwork.

An honest note on what this site is and isn't: the pages here are reviewed reference material about terminology, documents, and logistics. They are not professional medical advice, and nothing here is written to help you decide what to do about a symptom, a condition, or a medication. Where a page touches a clinical topic, it cites the responsible federal agency or specialty society and points you to your own clinician for decisions. If a page here and your doctor ever seem to disagree, your doctor wins.

Questions and corrections are welcome; we would rather fix a page than defend it.