MedlinePlus Health Topic Scraper

Search MedlinePlus — the U.S. National Library of Medicine's health information portal, trusted by patients and clinicians worldwide. Returns structured health topic data including plain-English summaries, MeSH terms, synonyms and topic categories.

Features

• Full-text search across all MedlinePlus health topics
• Returns NLM-authored summaries (patient-friendly language, medically accurate)
• Extracts MeSH terms, synonyms (altTitles) and topic categories
• Paginated — retrieves up to 1,000 results
• No API key required

Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Description
searchTerm	string	✅	—	Health topic, e.g. diabetes or hypertension
maxResults	integer		50	Max topics to retrieve (1–1,000)

Output

{
  "title": "Diabetes",
  "altTitles": ["Diabetes Mellitus", "Sugar Diabetes", "DM"],
  "categories": ["Metabolic Problems", "Endocrine System", "Older Adults"],
  "meshTerms": ["Diabetes Mellitus"],
  "summary": "Diabetes, also known as diabetes mellitus, is a disease in which your blood glucose levels are too high...",
  "snippet": "Diabetes, also known as diabetes mellitus, is a disease in which your blood glucose...",
  "url": "https://medlineplus.gov/diabetes.html"
}

Use Cases

1. Patient Education Platform

A digital health startup populates their patient portal with plain-English disease descriptions — using MedlinePlus summaries for 200 common conditions, ensuring the content is medically reviewed and free from copyright issues.

2. Medical Chatbot Knowledge Base

An AI startup building a medical FAQ chatbot scrapes all MedlinePlus topics related to cardiovascular and heart as source documents for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) — providing trustworthy NLM-authored content as the knowledge base.

3. Health Literacy Research

A public health researcher exports all topics tagged under the category Seniors to analyze how chronic disease information is communicated to older adults — comparing reading level and topic coverage across conditions.

Data Source

NLM MedlinePlus Web Service — authoritative health information from the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

Pricing

Pay-per-result. 100 topics ≈ $0.50.