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MeSH stands for Medical Subject Headings. MeSH is the National Library of Medicine's controlled vocabulary thesaurus used for indexing articles in the PubMed and Medline databases. Online resources such as ClinicalTrials.gov and Cochrane Library also use MeSH terms within their records. 

MeSH terms are assigned to records within these databases in order to provide the most precise searching method. One of the biggest benefits is that MeSH can often help you find medical terms not commonly used or known. You can use it as you would a thesaurus in order to identify alternative terms for your topic.