Lets Get Healthy

Health Source: Consumer Edition:

There were a lot of choices of journals, magazines, scholarly journals, etc on the Health Source: Consumer Edition section of Marvel. I searched for Rheumatoid Arthritis and got a lot of results. I read 2 different types of articles from the most recent offerings (2012 and 2010). One was from a magazine, Natural Health, and was an article about a woman’s success with beating back the effects of rheumatoid arthritis. It was an inspirational story about how she fought through the pain and managed to push her RA into remission. She did this by working out five days a week with both cardio and weights. She also changed the ways she ate by substituting fruits for greasy potato chips. After reading this short, inspiring article I thought maybe the more scientific articles may be harder to read. I picked an article from AHFS Consumer Medical Information about a medicine I have taken before. After reading this article, which was consumer friendly, I am glad that I stopped taking it! The article was very easy to understand and I will be passing it on to another colleague that I know takes this medicine. Great resource!

Medline Plus:

1. I could not find Medline Plus on Marvel so I Google searched it and found it on the NIH website. Medline was the only reference on Marvel.

2. When I finally found the page I found that the main page has a lot of info at your fingertips. There were some great articles referenced on the News column on the right side. There were articles about the possibility that people may not need to fast before a cholesterol test, there are gene differences with people who have lung cancer and smoked and those that did not smoke. There was also an article about how spinal steroid shots may not help people who have sciatica. If you were interested you could dig deeper into the news and click on the link that gives you more health news. They also have a section called Top Searches that offers a Wordle application to point out the most searched topics. The bigger the word the more times it has been searched. Asthma, Diabetes, Vitamin D and Hypertension were the most searched so far today.

3. After clicking on Drugs and Supplements, I looked up Levothyroxin. Levothyroxin is the medicine I have to take for my thyroid deficiency. There was a lot of information about this medication. It offered information on when to take this medication, what it is prescribed for, any interactions with other medications, what to do if you forget your medication, and any special diet information you may need to know. I searched for an herbal supplement after and found the same information choices as the prescribed medication.

4. When I searched for rheumatoid arthritis there were a lot more research offerings on Medline Plus than in Health Source: Consumer Edition. They give you a general overview of the disease and then they offer a starting point for your research. Scrolling down the page the topic is divided into many categories for deeper researching. The information seems to come more from organizations and colleges than from periodicals on Medline Plus. The information is more medically written than the Health Source edition and seems to be harder to understand than Health Source. However all results are full text because it links you directly to the website were the information came from.

5. When you click on videos you get a choice of Anatomy videos, Surgery videos and Interactive Tutorials. I looked at a video on rheumatoid arthritis through the interactive tutorials link. It was very good. It would be a great tool for doctors to use with their patients to help explain their disease or medical procedure they have or are going to have. It reads the slides to the user and shows great pictures to along with the descriptive text. When you choose a video to watch you have your choice of Interactive Tutorial (you can control), Self Playing Tutorial (runs by itself) or Text Summary (pdf version of the information).