Week 7 Consumer Health Resources: Health Source Consumer Edition and MedlinePlus
Sunday, November 11, 2012
On a limited collection development budget, how can you keep your medical books current when the Physician’s Desk Reference costs nearly $100 before discounts and the pace of new research means that medical information changes almost as quickly as computer technology?
One way to offer your patrons current and accurate consumer health information without breaking your budget is to use the Health Source-Consumer Edition from EBSCO via MARVEL or MedlinePlus which is the National Library of Medicine’s consumer database on the Internet.
Health Source – Consumer Edition
Health Source – Consumer Edition is produced by EBSCO for the public to use. The interface is just like all the other EBSCO databases available in MARVEL. Health Source indexes journals and magazines in the medical sciences, psychology, food science and nutrition, childcare, sports medicine, health care law and general health.
Discovery Exercise:
Create a blog posting discussing the following questions and other observations you have about Health Source – Consumer Edition. All resources can be accessed via this alphabetical list.
1. In Health Source – Consumer Edition, click on the Publications link at the top of the page and explore the types of magazines and journals indexed in the database.
2. Search for a disease or condition, such as diabetes. Sort your results by the most current publication date by clicking on the ‘Relevance Sort’ option.
3. Pick one of the articles you found and read through the full text. Was the article written in terms you could understand without consulting a medical dictionary?
MedlinePlus is produced by the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health. All the content in this resource is written with the consumer in mind. You’ll find overviews of medical conditions, pamphlets that can be printed, videos of surgical procedures and much more. MedlinePlus is not part of Marvel. The Medline database that is available in Marvel contains information intended more for the medical practitioner than for the consumer.
Discovery Exercise:
1. Go to Medline Plus (http://www.medlineplus.gov)
2. Look at a few of the links on the main page. What’s in the news column on the right side? Indicate in your blog post what some of the top searches are as listed on the left side of the page
3. Click on tab “Drugs and Supplements” and search for a medication you take or you have seen ads about recently such as Prilosec or Cymbalta. Note the kind of information available.
4. Click on “Health Topics” and search for the same disease or condition you looked at in Health Source. How does the information in MedlinePlus differ from that in Health Source?
5. Look at the list of videos available by clicking on “Videos and Cool Tools” tab. Pick one video and launch it so you have an idea of what a patron would experience. What did you think of the video?
MARVELous Maine Invitational 
November 11, 2012 at 10:44 pm
I can’t find a link to Medline Plus from MARVEL. What am I missing?
November 13, 2012 at 1:43 pm
Vicki, Medline Plus isn’t available through Marvel. The lesson contains a direct link to the website which is http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/.
November 14, 2012 at 10:40 pm
So…I FINALLY figured out the riddle to being able to post on Blogger and, frankly, feel a bit foolish. But since I saw others saying they were having the same difficulty, I thought I’d put my neck out and explain. You have to type in the squiggly letters AND whatever is in that little “photo” type box next to the them, more often than not a number, as it might look on the side of an apartment door. Now I understand what everyone meant by BOTH characters. and here I was trying to determine where the split was in those squiggly letters. Silly me.