MedlinePlus Consumer Health Topics Scraper

Get plain-language, consumer-facing health information straight from the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM). This actor searches MedlinePlus via the free, key-less NLM Web Service and returns clean, structured records — summaries, alternative titles, MeSH terms, health groups and links — ready for patient education tools, health chatbots and accessibility projects.

• No API key, no login, no account required.
• English and Spanish health topics (plus drug and genetics collections).
• Highlight markup and HTML are stripped for you — you get clean text.
• ~$0.50 per 1,000 records (typical), pay-as-you-go.

What makes this different from my other NLM/clinical actors

The NLM publishes many datasets. This actor is the consumer / patient-facing one — plain-language explanations written for the general public, not researchers or clinicians. Pick the right tool:

Actor	Audience	Data
MedlinePlus (this one)	Patients & public	Plain-language health topics: summaries, groups, MeSH, links
Clinical Trials Scraper	Researchers	ClinicalTrials.gov study records
NCBI E-utilities Scraper	Researchers	PubMed / NCBI database records
HPO Phenotype Scraper	Clinical genetics	Human Phenotype Ontology terms
NLM Clinical Tables Scraper	Developers/clinical	Coded clinical lookup tables (ICD, RxNorm…)

In short: the other actors return clinical, coded or research data. This one returns the readable, plain-language health content a patient would actually see on MedlinePlus.

Input

Field	Type	Description
mode	select	Operation mode. Only search is supported.
db	select	Collection: healthTopics (English), healthTopicsSpanish (Spanish), drugs, or genetics. Default healthTopics.
queries	array	Search terms; each is queried separately. Default ["diabetes","hypertension","asthma"].
maxItems	integer	Max total records across all queries. Default 200, hard cap 3000.

{
  "mode": "search",
  "db": "healthTopics",
  "queries": ["diabetes", "hypertension", "asthma"],
  "maxItems": 200
}

Output

Each dataset item is a health_topic record:

{
  "type": "health_topic",
  "title": "Diabetes",
  "alt_titles": ["Diabetes Mellitus", "Sugar Diabetes", "DM"],
  "full_summary": "What is diabetes? Diabetes, also known as diabetes mellitus, is a disease in which your blood glucose ...",
  "snippet": "What is diabetes? Diabetes, also known as diabetes mellitus, is a disease ...",
  "mesh_terms": ["Diabetes Mellitus"],
  "groups": ["Older Adults", "Endocrine System", "Metabolic Problems"],
  "url": "https://medlineplus.gov/diabetes.html",
  "organization": "National Library of Medicine",
  "language": "en",
  "query": "diabetes",
  "rank": 2,
  "source": "medlineplus",
  "scraped_at": "2026-08-11T00:00:00+00:00"
}

All fields are nullable. full_summary is HTML-stripped and capped at 6000 characters. Highlight tags (<span class="qt0">) are removed from every field.

Use cases

• Patient education — build readable condition explainers and handouts.
• Health chatbots — ground answers in authoritative NLM plain-language text.
• Plain-language content — source reliable, public-domain health copy.
• Accessibility — feed screen-reader-friendly, jargon-free health info.

Data source & licensing

Data comes from the NLM MedlinePlus Web Service (https://wsearch.nlm.nih.gov/ws/query), which is free and requires no key. MedlinePlus content is produced by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and is in the public domain (U.S. Government work). Please review NLM's terms and conditions and attribute the source where appropriate.

Notes

• This actor does not provide medical advice; it retrieves published NLM content.
• Pagination is handled automatically via retstart / retmax.