There really is an app for that (health) interest...or will be

We recently had a look at the variety of health-related apps available. In our assessment, we looked beyond the iPhone to also include apps for the Blackberry and Android. Below we've listed some that show the diversity of what's available. I confess to being a bit amazed at the variety and interested to see what gets launched as the Blackberry app store gains traction and Android phones are released. Bottom-line:  Some good reference tools and replacements for paper-and-pencil tracking may be helpful. 

Health & Wellness 

• Calorie Tracking/Counting. Diet applications: Diet Tracker for the iPhone . $2.99
• Fitness/Exercise Tracking. Pedometer. GPS. Mapping:  Absolute Fitness for Android. $4.99  (Log exercise, weight and diet goals. Export data to multiple formats and online backup of data); 
• Weight loss, quit smoking, cut cholesterol. No Smoking for Blackberry. $9.99
• Family Planning:  Ovulation Calendar for Blackberry. $2.99
• First Aid decision guide. First aid training:  Pocket First Aid & CPR from American Heart Association for iPhone. $3.99
• Pregnancy Tracker: Your Pregnancy Week by Week for Blackberry. $15.99
• Sleep tracking: Sleep logger for Android. FREE
• UV tracking:  iSunBurn for iPhone $0.99
• Relaxation:  TouchBreath for Android. $4.95  (Breathing and lung function improvement.)
• ICE (In case of emergency information for first responders and hospital staff):  ICE for Android. $2.99
• Illness Trackers: NIH Breast Cancer Consultant for Blackberry. $3.99
• Health Records: My Personal Health Record for Blackberry. FREE
• Medication management:  Medication tracker for iPhone. $0.99

Is it ADHD, or something else?

An 11-year-old boy I’ll call Joseph was brought to my office by his concerned parents. He was throwing fits every morning because he hated to go to school.

As a psychologist with a part-time practice assessing attention and emotional disorders, my first thought was that Joseph’s refusal to go to school might be related to either separation anxiety or a behavior disorder. But as I questioned the parents, I learned that Joseph didn’t have trouble separating from his parents when it was time for his soccer games or to play with his friends. In general he was a well-behaved, compliant boy who, except for school refusal, showed no signs of defiant behavior.

On further questioning, the father revealed that he himself had some trouble with reading and often lost interest in activities at work. When I asked about Joseph’s reading and attention, his parents said that they knew he was a smart boy, but the teacher had mentioned that he had been missing details and tended to space out during reading assignments.

After a learning evaluation with a clinical neuropsychologist that included getting feedback from the school, Joseph was diagnosed with a minor reading disability and attention deficit disorder. It turned out that he was avoiding school because he was embarrassed about his declining performance and inability to complete reading assignments as quickly as his peers.

Joseph’s parents asked the school to make the recommended accommodations, including sessions with a reading specialist, extended time for reading assignments, and moving his seat to the front of the classroom. This helped improve Joseph’s performance and attitude. He was soon able to go to school without the morning outburst.

While most people think of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as screaming and climbing the walls, a number of children like Joseph suffer primarily from symptoms of inattention, such as missing details, losing things, being forgetful, or avoiding disliked activities. It can be difficult to untangle learning and attention problems from the emotional consequences of experiencing these issues.

Social networks and the flu

"This hurts me as much as it hurts you." That’s the title of a chapter in Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives. The authors, Nicholas Christakis (physician and social scientist) and James Fowler (political scientists) offer some readable, research-based insights on social networks that made me think afresh about their relevance in my daily life now that we're entering flu season.

The book talks about six degrees of connection. Remember the six degrees of Kevin Bacon game? Well it's actually a factual analogy for how we really are all connected.  Connection of this sort may seem pretty abstract—good for a job hunt via LinkedIn, but not so meaningful in everyday life.

Another concept is three-degrees of relevance, suggesting that influence occurs within three degrees, so "if we are connected to everyone else by six degrees and we can influence them up to three degrees, …one way to think about ourselves is that each of us can reach about halfway to everyone else on the planet.”  If so, then each of us has much more influence and power than we may be aware of, especially those of us who are central in our networks, being a go-to person among  family, job, community organization, etc.  (You know who you are.)

Connectivity is significant when we’re talking about how things spread—from ideas to diseases—because we actually influence each other through the establishment of behaviors and norms.  My take-away is that behaviors are contagious. Just think about the laughter clubs springing up around the world.

Health care reform: Continuing the conversation

Our new survey on the continuing woes of our health care system has drawn considerable comment from people with passionate views both for and against the reform legislation being debated in Congress.

We’re guessing that some of those who have come here are new to Consumer Reports and may not be aware of the work we’ve been doing for years on the U.S. health system, such as the visitor who wrote:

Give us reviews of the insurance companies so that we the consumers can make informed decisions.

As longtime readers know, we’ve been reporting on health insurance for the past several years. Subscribers can access our Ratings of PPOs and Ratings of HMOs, and all visitors can learn how to select good health plans, avoid bad ones, and make the most of the coverage they have.

Several commenters pointed to cancer survival statistics showing that Americans live longer after diagnosis with many cancers than do people living in European countries with universal health care. These statistics are a favorite of health-reform foes, but FactCheck.org, a project of the nonprofit Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, cautions that:

You never know what’s coming for ya

I finally saw the movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button this weekend and woke to a bright morning thinking the movie’s refrain “You never know what’s coming for ya.” So I was primed for the unexpected as I read the troubling content on Dead By Mistake, a site that features the results of a Hearst investigative report on medical errors. The site’s most compelling feature is the set of 30 profiles and heart wrenching photos of lives lost unexpectedly under circumstances that certainly seemed preventable.

This new content echoes the report we released in May as part of our Safe Patient Project.  Our report, To Err is Human—To Delay is Deadly, looks at specific infection-preventing practices state by state and the status of legislation to make hospital infection rates available to consumers.  Ten years ago the Institute of Medicine declared that as many as 98,000 people die each year needlessly because of preventable medical harm, including health care-acquired infections. Ten years later, we don’t know if we’ve made any real progress, and efforts to reduce the harm caused by our medical care system are few and fragmented. In fact, we gave the country a failing grade on progress on select recommendations we believe necessary to create a health-care system free of preventable medical harm.

The power of stories: listen carefully

I am a librarian by training. That means I read and digest information for a living, all the while making sure I know the authority of my sources. Most of what I ingest is the printed word, but increasingly there’s video. Thanks to internet stations for news and radio (and bandwidth here in Yonkers) I usually multi-task to radio and video broadcasts.

The Associated Press reports that I am not alone. If you are tracking the debate over health care reform you are likely to encounter video as "... thousands of people [are] now telling their stories on videos, ads and Web sites on both sides of the health care debate." Our own Cover America Tour added dozens of compelling videos to this mix as we strove to put faces to the challenges in our health care system.

Video is a powerful medium through which to share individual stories and experiences. Telling stories is powerful; it personalizes and taps into our ability to empathize with the plight of another. But remember to consider the authority of your source. In a recent presentation by Professor Gary Schwitzer, publisher of HealthNewsReview.org, I got the reminder that "the plural of anecdote is not data." The individuals that share these experiences are speaking for themselves. The organizations that collect and promote them often have a point-of-view. As a consumer of information, you have to determine which way the preponderance of experience, if not evidence, points.

—Elena Falcone, Consumer Reports Information Analyst

Watch Tony's story (above) and take a look at more videos from our Cover America Tour.

Both too much and too little: Obesity and malnutrition in America

Two weeks ago Dr. Joe Coughlin from MIT’s Age Lab came to Consumers Union to talk about usability of products for an older population.  I was struck by the description of the microwave oven as a key assistive technology. This ubiquitous appliance is a valuable tool in combating a growing problem of malnutrition among the elderly, serving up prepared nutritious meals for those with a diminished appetite and dietary restrictions in just minutes and a few taps on a key pad.  So the microwave is a caregiver's best friend.  We routinely packaged "extra" meals for my mother-in-law to store in her freezer and reheat, minus anything spicy that she wouldn't like.  That kept her home at least an extra year until assisted living became the best option.

In addition to malnutrition, another concern is obesity among older adults, as well as the population at large. A just released study by the Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that adult obesity rates increased in 23 states and did not decrease in a single state in the past year.  (Check out the interactive map to see a ranking of body mass index by state.)  The study notes that the Baby Boom generation has a higher rate of obesity compared with previous generations, which will drive obesity-related costs to Medicare and Medicaid as this group ages into eligibility. In addition, the percentage of obese or overweight children is at or above 30 percent in 30 states.

Take two helpings of health information...

The Social Life of Health Information, a new report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, has examined the health research behaviors of Americans, finding that 57% of adults that use the internet to find health information.  It was interesting to note that half of that activity was related to looking up guidance for someone else, which is a reminder of how many of us play the role of carer when it comes to health. 

But if you want to think about how to address health before it becomes something you need to research and fix, take a look at this report by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Commission to Build a Healthier America (April 2009):  Beyond Health Care: New Directions to a Healthier America.  The executive summary starts with the chilling statement that the United States is raising a generation of children who may live sicker, shorter lives than their parents.  How do we change that future?  RWJF offers a thought-provoking review of what would constitute a healthier society, ample data and analysis to support their view and proposals, and profiles of current programs that illustrate what could be done. 

—Consumer Reports Information Analysts

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