What is WebMD about anyway?

WebMD has been around for a while now and seems to be one of the most well developed consumer oriented web sites out there. The focus of WebMD seems to be providing information to health care consumers rather than a PHR oriented site such has Health Vault. They do have a lot of information about diseases, medications, diet and exercise. I went searching through their medication database and it was quite impressive. They give you a lot of information about the medication such as what illnesses it is used for, how it works and some of the side effects. All of the information is one convenient location and more importantly, it has been reviewed by qualified individuals. I also tried looking up some illnesses to see what it would return back. When I did a search on lymphoma, it did return lots of links with general information about the disease and how it is treated. The one thing I did not like, however was the fact that on the results page, the good links were towards the bottom instead of the top. The top few links were actually external links to other sites and I also found myself in a “Hyperlink maze” (No useful information, just a series of pages with links to other pages) .I did create an account for myself, thinking that I would be able to enter personal information such as level of physical activity, medical history, drinking behavior but I did not find that it ever asked me for any of this information. I was assuming that one would put this kind of information into the system and it would make recommendations for you but I guess that is no how it works. They do have some “tools” that will calculate your risk for certain diseases but you have to provide the tools with this information manually. It does give you some account settings for receiving specific types of information. So for example, if you have heart disease and want information on this, you can receive news related to heart disease.I know that WebMD does offer health coaching for a fee. My current employer provides this as a bonus. The health coach can assist you with things such as improving your diet and exercise program and help with other things such as reducing insomnia.Overall, WebMD has a lot of useful and reliable information.

The DSM-V is coming!

The 5th version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM of the American Psychiatric Association is currently in development and is scheduled to be released some time in 2013. From the looks of things right now, it seems that they are pretty close to having it done and right now they are working on the finishing touches. One interesting thing is that the APA is trying to get feedback about the new changes, not only from the medical community but from patient support groups and the general public as well. This certainly seems to be a shift in philosophy compared to the “Doctor knows best” thinking of the mid 20th century. Although I certainly do embrace this new paradigm, it has opened up the proverbial can of worms. There seem to be many people voicing their objections to some of the proposed changes. For example, one of the proposed changes is to eliminate the diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome (A very mild form of autism) and just roll it up into the diagnosis of autism. There has been a change in the DSM-V for the diagnosis of autism which now makes the diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome redundant. This seems like a very minor and technical change but according to NPR, there is a community of people with Asperger’s Syndrome that has developed over the years and who have developed a sense of pride in who they are and their condition. This new change would certainly be a threat to the identity of this community. Is that reason enough to not eliminate Asperger’s Syndrome? I honestly don’t know. The addition of new disorders is also bringing criticism. Jerome Burne of dailymail.com has pointed out that some of the new proposed disorders include hoarding and bing-eating and alludes to his opinion that the DSM is already too bloated and the addition of these new disorders is the result of the fact that psychiatrists like making up new classifications and medicating people for anything that might be slightly wrong with them. There has even been criticism of the use of NOS (not otherwise specified). This is a modifier for some families of disorders so that individual cases that don’t meet the criteria for a specific diagnosis don’t fall through the cracks. For example, a patient may have the symptoms of depression but not meet the criteria for a diagnosis of a specific type of depression (major depression, dysthymic depression … ). There are those on the internet that interpret NOS as a way for doctors and others to “give problems” to people who really don’t have any. I did study psychology in college but I’m not a therapist or a doctor so I can’t comment on the technical details of the new changes to the DSM. It does seem to me however that a lot of this criticism seems to be churning from the “perpetual emotion machine” that is our media industry. I’m sure there are lots of legitimate concerns about the proposed changes but most of what I’m seeing seems to be the normal “catastrophizing “ of current events.