Week 7 - Consumer Health Resources

Health Source - Consumer Edition
I found many different publications from periodicals, books and health reports to pamphlets, academic journals, trade publications and more.
I searched hypertension and found over 3,000 results. I selected an article titled A Strike Against Stroke which was the cover story from Nutrition Action health Letter dated Nov. 2012. The article was very interesting and informative as well as being easy to understand. I didn't feel like I had to have a medical dictionary to understand what I was reading. I found the magnifying glass to the right of the article's title to be a helpful option. By clicking on that I was able to get a brief description of what the article was about. The Contents list to the left of the article makes it easy to jump to exatly what you are looking for. I think that this is a great resource for information and is very user-friendly.

Medline Plus
The home page has a lot of information available. The Health News for today addressed US Diabetes rates soaring, 60 percent of America's biggest cities are now smoke-free and the fact that alcoholic drinks add 100 calories a day to the average adult's diet along with a link to more health news. On the left side of the page were a numbe of top searches with the largest and boldest being the sites most visited. Autism, diabetes, hypertension and vitamin d were the top searches. Some of the other popular searches included asthma, shingles, breast cancer and aspirin.

I did a search for hydrochlorothiazide which is a water pill prescribed for hypertension. The information available included why it is prescribed, how to take it, special precautions, dietary instructions and more importantly the side effets caused by taking this medicaiton. There was a lot of helpful information and it was very easy to understand.

I once again searched for hypertension and found that this database offered many more links such as research, basics, reference info and a very interesting link to multimedia and cool tools which offers tutorials, videos, pictures and photographs. To the right are links to Medical Encyclopedias, Related Topics and even links to other languages. The options seemed unlimited and the information was more in depth that what I found on Health Source. I feel that this database is geared more toward the medical profession.

I watched a video on coronary artery disease and heart disease in women. I found them both to be very informative. There is even a link to quizzes so you can check your knowledge after watching the video. I do think that this database would be one that I would refer back to along with Health Source. Great resources!