How to know what to believe when reading about new health treatments

People with very real medical conditions changing their treatment to something they read someplace. Some of this is legitimate research that could improve health and quality of life, but some of it is downright bullshit. Most importantly any change in treatment or start of treatment should be talked about with your medical practitioner (doctor, PA or nurse practitioner). They have the knowledge to help you decided what is the best treatment for you. They also know when a new treatment (or vitamin) will interact with other medications or treatments you are taking, so talk with them. Without further preface here are a few ways you can know that the literature out there is good.
1) Peer Reviewed
Peer review is when someone of equal education and experience as the author says that this literature is good. If a journal has "American Association of ________________" in the name, it's probably peer reviewed. A good place to find peer reviewed journals for free is here PubMed. Peer reviewing helps improve quality, credibility and relevance.
2) Date
How old is this literature? If it's medical or scientific literature, and it was published more than 10 years ago, you have one of two situations. A)It's been tested a lot, and proven to be true or B)It's not been tested and is questionable at best. Bear in mind that the scientific community once thought the world was flat. Conversely if the literature is new you always run the risk of the unknown.
3) Repeatability
We shouldn't be jumping to change our world because one experiment gave one result. What if that scientist had dirty beakers and the scum on them gave him false data? Watch and wait until there is more than one paper to back up the research. Multiple experiments or repeating the same experiment multiple times and getting the same result removes the variables so that we can know that the experiment gave an accurate result.
4) Government
If you actually think that the man is trying to keep you down by keeping you unhealthy, take your aluminum hat with you when you skip this section. As a rule, the government (the CDC, the NIH or the WHO) is very tight lipped with making announcements about advances in health, because they are looking into the above reasons to make sure they don't tell you the wrong thing. They generally won't tell you something unless they have done the footwork to make sure it is true (at the moment, to the best of our knowledge)