Wellness #42: Staying Well

The Symptom Checker and the Pill Identifier both seem to be incomplete in some ways. The symptom checker doesn't include some symptoms for adults, like skin rashes, that are shown for children. The Pill Identifier is missing some basic shapes like circular and cylindrical. They both can be useful in some cases, though.

The Interaction Checker has actually been very important for me in the past. My uncle was experiencing severe heaviness in his legs several years ago and could hardly walk. He had recently been prescribed a new medication by one of his several doctors. I checked it against the drugs that he was already taking and found this to be a sign of a serious interaction with another medication. Once he stopped the new drug, his complications disappeared. Interactions between medications can be a danger, especially for older adults, when they have a number of different physicians. It is helpful to have a free source like this to check.

Using the local Medline, I searched for Complementary and Alternative Medicine sites and found some interesting possibilities, including:

1) Center for Wellness and Healing (supporting immunity enhancement, natural treatments for diseases, detoxification, etc.)

2) a Humor Therapy Center

3) many therapeutic massage centers.

The Family Health Portrait can be a useful tool for sharing health information, especially on inherited conditions, with members of an extended family. The graphics it generates can also be used for other purposes to illustrate the relationships within a family for a genealogy study.