Sailor Database Review: Health & Wellness Resource Center

Looking for an overview of Marfan Syndrome for a school assignment? Have a friend who is looking for alternative treatments for her migraine headaches? Need to know the possible side effects of that new drug you started taking? Have a student looking for case studies on bipolar disorders?

Kate Niemcyzk, the consumer health librarian at the Enoch Pratt Free Library/State Library Resource Center, reviews Gale’s Health & Wellness Resource Center to see if it can help you answer those questions and others. The database is crammed full of useful information While it has great information, it also comes with some problem areas.

The Home page gives you a variety of ways to search. There are both tabs and boxes. The most comprehensive search is to use either the “Advanced Search” tab at the top or the “search” box. A search in either of these places will bring up results divided by source: magazines and journals, videos with their text, drug & herb information, and overviews from books. In search, you can limit to full-text articles, consumer information and refereed publications.

Problem Area: The results displays are limited to only 10 items per page. Any items you mark on a page to be kept will be lost unless you “Update Marked List” before you leave that page—even if it is to read one of your hits on that page.

The “Diseases and Conditions” tab allows you to alphabetically access the wonderful overviews found in the Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine. The entries are arranged in a useful way for assignments: definition & description, causes & symptoms, diagnosis, treatment & prognosis.
Problem Area: There don’t appear to be any “see references”. For example, I was looking for high blood pressure, and did not find it. I found any entry for hypertension. There wasn’t anything telling me at high blood pressure to “see” hypertension.



The “Alternative Medicine” tab allows you to alphabetically access the overviews found in the Gale Encyclopedia of Alternative Medicine. These articles include much of the same information as the articles in Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine with the addition of alternative medicine’s view of the cause. Both traditional allopathic treatments and alternative/complementary treatments are included.

Problem Area: Again, no “see references.”

Drugs & Herbal Remedies can be searched through either a box or tab. Typing in an herb, prescription or over-the-counter drug by generic or brand name, brings up a list of hits from mostly print sources clearly showing their publication dates. The sources include Detailed Drug Information for the Consumer, Drug Information for Consumers from PDRhealth.com, and The PDR for Herbal Medicines.

Problem Area: A search by drug name usually brings up a long list of mostly irrelevant hits (but the relevant hits will be at the top.) The results displays are limited to only 10 items per page. There is no “fuzzy” search, so if you spelled the name wrong, it will not offer you any alternative spellings.

The Health & Wellness Resource Center also includes a dictionary (which unlike the dictionary in MedlinePlus, does not offer alternative spellings if you don’t get any hits), a directory of hospitals, organizations, journals, and programs, a list of trusted Web sites, and a list of health assessment tools and calculators.

I expect to most often use the overviews in the Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine and the Search function. Many times the overviews in the print version of the Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine have been perfect for both students working on assignments and for people just starting to research their own newly diagnosed condition. The Search function will be useful for people who are interested in looking for articles or doing more in depth research—both students who need more than an overview and customers looking for information about a disease or condition for personal reasons.