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WebMD is a medical reference website that has been available for many years. For the casual browser or someone a little more health conscious, the services and information that it offers are an invaluable resource.
The landing area of the home page has a regular rotation of content covering preventative and informational medical issues, such as what symptoms of constant distraction might tell someone or how to increase calcium in one’s diet without drinking milk.
There is a listing of Health Conditions in alphabetical order, which saves copious amounts of time searching for a specific condition. Each condition links to it’s own web page that provides an overview of signs and symptoms, and then smaller sections covering a ‘Community’ area, a ‘Question & Answer’ area, and reams of other helpful info.
The site boasts an RSS feed for the Health News section that is updated regularly with stories ranging from the recall of medicines by pharmaceutical companies to what a person’s sleep position reveals about their personality.
One of the more interesting areas is the healthy lifestyle area entitled ‘Living Better’. With health care costs sky-rocketing and health plans promoting living a healthier lifestyle to prevent expensive medical claims, this area is indispensable in terms of the advice that it offers. From dental health through to healthy pregnancies, it covers the majority of trends and lifestyle choices.
There are numerous other areas to this site, such as a tool to check the symptoms that a visitor to the site might be experiencing and provide recommendations, all of which serve the site’s purpose of aiding people in making right choices. What it does, and does very effectively, is remove the complexities from the medical field and make this content accessible and understandable to the average consumer.
Will WebMD ever replace a scheduled visit to one’s doctor? Probably not, but it might help providing the patient with the correct questions to ask when they go.
