- Healthcentral

www.healthcentral.com

Health Central is well suited for the viewer in search of information-rich (videos included), easy-to-follow explanations on more than 100 major medical conditions and hundreds of symptoms. It is packed with information about the symptoms, treatment and prevention of specific diseases, and the diverse causes of and treatments for particular symptoms. There is no fee for accessing any information.

Among its multimedia features, the home page offers links to videos, 3D animations and TV specials about health topics. The medical animation library covers a few dozen conditions. The videos use layperson’s language and seem most often intended to explain how drug therapies succeed in alleviating a disease.

The home page section, “Dr. Dean Edell: Insight from America’s Doctor,” posts a short list of timely articles that refresh weekly. When you click on the Dr. Dean Edell link, you will find a “Dr. Dean Questions” department with answers to questions you might not want to ask your doctor, such as the harm of marijuana smoking while receiving hepatitis C treatment.

Health Central’s home page also provides a drug library, which offers basic information about some popular medications. There’s also an encyclopedia with entries on diseases, symptoms, tests and procedures, poisons, surgery, injury, nutrition, treatments and special topics. The “Special Offers” section consists of links to advertisers offering discounts or other services.

The site offers email subscription newsletters on 11 topics, such as “Kid’s Health” and “Alternative Medicine”; simple interactive health tests; and RSS (“Really Simple Syndication”), news article feeds for your computer’s desktop that are updated automatically.

The final link on the top menu bar of the home page, “Health Tools,” offers more than a dozen calculators, ratings and simple interactive tests that you can take to see how you fare compared with other healthy people. Topics include “How Much Fat Should I Eat?” “Baby Due Date Calculator,” “Stress Test,” and “What’s Your Love I.Q.?,” a relationship assessment.

The site can be navigated using the drop-down menu list of diseases, by typing in a keyword, or by clicking on links that are found everywhere on the home page and throughout the site.

Health Central is operated by Choice Media, Inc., the publishing and marketing company that also operates healthscout.com, MDchoice.com, heartinfo.com, DrKoop.com and healthsquare.com.

Last modified: 20 Sep 2006.