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.