I would definitely benefit from iBaby Care, an iPhone app for new parents by D Technolabs, who also created ASL – American Sign Language (read the review here). When first opening the app, I was less than thrilled with its bland interface, and I was tempted to just toss it in the reject pile. After all, what new parent has the time to sift through dully presented information – there are plenty of colorful, and well-organized books on the market that most parents are happy to shell out a good, upwards of $20 for. I forced myself, though, to give this app a chance, and I can say with complete truthfulness that I’m glad I did so. It’s true, the app is pretty lackluster – the interface is nothing more than rows of bold-type headings like Baby Care, Growth Development, Breast Feeding, Sleeping, Handling, Talking, Crying, etc, followed by plain, written sections of black font on generic white background – but it’s actually not too bad to read. It’s pretty much an outline, or an essay with bullet points, of all the most pertinent points on having a newborn. Babies are complex human beings, and every new parent needs to understand all the intricacies of, say, holding the baby correctly, or properly reinforcing the instinct and urge to talk. I recently welcomed a brand new puppy into my life, and while raising an animal is different from a human, properly raising a puppy includes thoroughly researching the basics that help develop your pup into a mature adult – things like adequate feeding, housebreaking, greeting manners, and commands to keep your dog in your control. These essential rubrics are fairly similar, only much more complex, when raising a baby.

iBaby Care tries to narrow and focus the scope of baby literature, so definitely do not use this guide as research when you’re pregnant – there are more thorough, and detailed resources for that. However, iBaby Care is an excellent glossary-type guide, to remind yourself of the basics, or as a quick study for interpreting crying, or better scheduling your breastfeeding (or bottlefeeding). I found the Growth and Development section of great potential use for parents. Just as I have a guide for my puppy, it’s important to keep track of your growing child’s developement, whether he’s underweight or overweight, within average for his age, or an outlier. For your baby’s future health, it’s good to keep such things under careful watch. The section on Baby Care and Health Care may seem common sense, but for many people, it may not be, so it’s good to have a section that covers proper temperature, vomiting, irritability and the like.

I enjoyed reading the section on handling, because in case it wasn’t apparent in the opening paragraph, I’m not terribly adept at holding babies. The Crying section had some good pointers too; I particularly liked the app’s advice on various holding positions to soothe a crying baby:

“Hold your baby facedown over your forearm with his head at your elbow and your thumb and fingers wrapped around his thigh. Hold your baby seated in your hand with his back to your chest and your other hand across his chest, wrapping your thumb and fingers around his upper arm.”

Descriptive enough to visualize, and strangely instinctual sounding.

I may compliment iBaby Care on its advice, but I admit it’s not the greatest app. It’s dull to look at, which is a huge drawback for anything on the iPhone. With such an awesome gadget, it’s borderline lazy to create a written app without so much as an illustration in it. There are also a few typos here and there – nothing major that would be cause for concern, just the random, annoying switching of prepositions for incorrect ones. If it’s a dully presented app, it should at least be written perfectly. Plus, I digress: the information contained within is a good, quick guide, but there are so many other resources for parents that it’s hard to assess whether parents would give this app a second look. Used bookstores, and online manuals are nearly as cheap, are much easier to read, and carry much more information, so why bother buying iBaby Care? Their heart is in the right place, and it’s still an untapped market in the iPhone app world, but iBaby Care has quite a ways to go before I’d consider it a worthwhile app.

A somber fog hushes the woods. A fog so thick it’s palpable, able to be indented, as it undulates, clinging to the craggy faces of rocky outcrops and the splintered shell of an antique, befallen stump. A deer steps out from the thicket, dew cascading from her mange-bitten fur, her doleful eyes searching for something. A piece of bark with those chewy grubs, maybe. A spot of grass. Lowering her muzzle to nose the ground, she huffs hot air into the soil, revealing tender shoots of grass, and the deer starts eating mindfully. But, the grass is so tender, and the fog so quiet, the deer makes the mistake of snuffling a bit too loudly, and chewing with nary an ounce of abrupt, onset fret, like most, inherently flighty deer. Had she minded her species’ instincts, her god-given skills, she would not have been unaware of the strange, crepuscular creature to her left, hidden in the underbrush, the creature with no fur, and lanky, joint-ridden extremities. She also, would have been aware of the snare.

* * * *

In situations of peril when you are alone, lost, in the wilderness, there will come a time when you must fend for yourself, meaning you must find food, water, and shelter. You must survive. Relying on your instincts, your body and senses, is an arduous, challenging task, and one that many people fail at – some people never make it out of the wilderness. Think about the odds – it’s you against nature. Wild animals, rocky precipices, extreme temperatures, lack of water, poisonous plants, giardia, broken limbs, and far more pose serious threats to the untrained individual. Unless you’re a wilderness instructor, a ranger, or a member of the U.S. Army, Marine Corps, Navy or Air Force, you’re fairly plumb out of luck. However, some reading can be done on the subject, and what better way than with the new Survival Pocket Reference app, a guide to Survival Tactics by the US Military, itself (developed by Double Dog Studios). Hell, they’re only the authority on the subject.

This app doesn’t kid around. Starting off in quintessential military fashion, the app opens with a lively background splash of camouflage, with the next few pages dissecting the given mnemonic of S-U-R-V-I-V-A-L into its various mantras and codes. Either flip through like a book, or double tap the screen to access Chapter, to bookmark, and to otherwise easily navigate. The app then delves deeply into 11 chapters covering all the most important areas of knowledge. Some are more militaristic than others, dealing with evasion techniques in enemy territory, and proper POW interactions (in short, no interaction), but a lot of the information in these sections can be applied to the outdoor enthusiast, as well. Skills like radio communications and fire signals (Chapter 4), and navigation (Chapter 3) – knowing how to make a sun compass, determining your position, star navigation, triangulation and more – are truly exceptional assets that can spell success for the hopeless wayward. Even the chapter on “Evasion”(Chapter 2) can be relayed from avoiding enemy detection to avoiding animal detection. It’s good to know how to move along the ground, how to conceal yourself and your odors, and to understand that binnocular vision is best for direct examination – when tracking an animal, say – and that peripheral vision is better trusted at night for recognizing movement in the twilight. Some tips seem common sense, sure, but reading them from a recognized manual gives them some credence, some tangibility, over your basic first instincts.

*****

Scene: Siskiyou Wilderness – Day

Greg bit hard into the heavily charred thigh of venison. No grubs, a good sign. He had put the meat away before the flies could get to it. Rolling the meat around in his mouth, trying for the best angle of chew – game meat is always so rubbery – Greg noticed the cut on his arm looked a little worse for the wear than the night before, a few pustules visible just below the skin. That deer’s hooves sure were sharp.

Did I wash it enough?

Yes, yes, I did. A foreign body, maybe.

Maybe it’s impetigo.

He closed his eyes and sighed, knowing if it was impetigo, then there likely was an infection. He would have to find some tree bark, possibly from that acorn tree where he had made shelter the previous night. Finishing up the last stringy piece of meat, he threw the bone into the flailing fire, the last dying embers valiantly leaping in dazzling, futile trajectories toward those tempting pine needles scattered in clumps in all directions.

*****

The First Aid section of this app (Chapter 6), is exceptionally thorough for a quick guide to survival. A whole section on Plant Medicine shows the different uses of the Common Cattail, the Common Plantain, Willow leaves, Aspen leaves, tree bark, and several other less common plants that can be used to treat dystentary, boils, infections, and more. For the more serious bodily injuries, the app makes sure to include handy and easily deciphered illustrations going over the various steps in, say, how to properly apply a compression bandage for a snakebite. The big offenders are obviously included in this chapter, conditions like Hypothermia and Frostbite; Heat Stroke and Sun/Snow Blindness; Burns, Fractures, and Shock; and tools like how to apply a tourniquet, how to perform CPR, and how to properly apply a bandage. The First Aid section pays great attention to details, covering even pressure points along the body, to ease hemorrhaging, and covering the concern of a “sucking chest wound,” a frightful condition where the chest wall has been penetrated, causing the victim to gasp for breath. Many of these techniques require some technical skill, but it’s nothing so far advanced that a thorough perusing of the chapter won’t prepare you.

The chapter on Personal Protection (Chapter 7) may be overlooked by some for its sheer common sense value, but it would be unwise to do so. Remembering that your priorities are to 1) construct a shelter and 2) procure water, are absolutely vital to your initial 24 hours of survival. This section also covers helpful clothing amenities, such as how to improvise gaiters, foot pads, bedding, and snow goggles. It’s of great significance that this chapter heavily covers different types of shelter: immediate shelters (ones from already present objects that require minimal action on your part), thermal A frames (like an angular, sideways teepee), snow trenches, snow caves, molded domes, and more. Pitch (i.e. sap) from trees may be used as tinder (defined by the app as a smaller version of kindling, meant to be finely shredded to provide a low combustion point), and fires may be created through any one of various designs, all of which can be narrowed down to what’s available in your situation. If you think all this is mind-blowing, then wait until you check out the water section. I, for one, had absolutely no idea you could whack off a piece of bamboo and drink the water within. Next time I’m in China, I’ll have to try that.

The other chapters cover, obviously, Food (Chapter 9), and two of a more curious nature. Chapter 10 probably won’t pertain to most people stuck in the wilderness, it covering Man-induced conditions like post-nuclear, post-chemical or post-biological attacks. But, for those completely stricken with the never-ending fear of terrorists, such knowledge isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Chapter 11 – an appendix that concerns Edible and Medicinal Plants – is definitely more useful, but it treads a thin line of reliability on personal judgment. For anyone who has read Jon Krakauer’s heartbreaking book, Into the Wild, you can understand how mistaking one plant for another can spell the difference between health and a crippling, drawn-out death. Take the elderberry, for example. Commonly found all over the East Coast of the United States, the elderberry is a delicious berry I would eat as a kid in Pennsylvannia in the form of jellies, jams, and baked into cobblers. It’s quite good for sore throats, and we would pick them by the basket load in the summer. However, it’s all too easily confused with the water hemlock, cicuta, a highly poisonous plant that, upon ingestion, releases a toxin named cicutoxin, which causes seizures and other central nervous system disorders. Some varieties of elderberry, too, have poisonous properties, like the bush with red berries, sambucus racemosa, which is toxic regardless of cooking. The edible elderberry is even toxic raw, as it contains a large quantity of cyanide.

For anyone who makes a habit of plundering in the backwoods of some remote area, like the Siskiyou in northern California (the most isolated stretch of forest in the continental U.S.) or in the trenches of Appalachia (Deliverance, anyone?), or anywhere else in the world, the Survival Pocket Reference is your new best friend. In one backpacking excursion in the Siskiyou with three friends, one of the girls and I had become lost in the woods, disoriented from our camp location. Thankfully, I knew enough about compass and topography to re-situate ourselves; every backpacker or ardent hiker must know how to read a topographical map. But, then again, what if we didn’t have our map? Who knows, we could have gone off in the wrong direction, and ended up miles away from our destination. Had we not been as bright, or more inclined to panic, we could have been in serious peril. This app, certainly, could have saved our lives.

*****

Scene – Siskiyou – Smith River – Day

Greg surveyed the scene. The river was fully engorged, a sheer white sweep of rushing liquid, freshly thawed from the spring sun’s rays. Should he cross? He thought better of it. He could be swept away in the torrential river, and whatever strength he could muster wouldn’t help him any once his body hit a rock, his body thwacking with incredible force, and ribs cracking, no doubt. There would also be hypothermia to contend with. No, he would have to follow downstream. Or, was it upstream? If only he had gotten lost in the winter.

As soon as I downloaded Food Additives, I rushed to the cupboard to see some ingredients lists. Safeway brand whole wheat crackers, you shall be my guinea pig! Without boring you with the scientific details, I will cut to the chase and give you the skinny:

Things the app does well

• Provides a database of food additives organized by government issued number, common names, risk level, symptoms they cause, and diet.
• Color codes risk levels to provide instant stress relief/enhancement
• Two full pages of information on each additive that are easy to navigate, which include outgoing links for more information.

I’m a big fan of apps that are self contained. Food Additives is all within your iPhone (or iPod Touch) – with the exception of extraneous links – so you may feel happy to peruse the list of safe and unsafe food additives whilst at the bottom of a well, inside a mineshaft, or under the ocean.

I must commend Food Additives’ design. To pull back the magical curtain of glorification and view the true OZ of this app, it is a static database broken down into cross referencing categories. To make this interesting is a bit of a design feat and I think Food Additives has done a fine job at it using sleek graphics and icons.

As I went down the list of additives in my whole wheat crackers, I couldn’t help but wonder if (a) “whole wheat” was indeed as important to my health as was indoctrinated into my childhood understanding of diet, and (b) if it was going to show up on the ingredients list.

I found most of the additive type ingredients in Food Additive’s list, but also found a good number missing.

Things the app needs work on

• More food additives added to the list
• outgoing links to more reliable sources than wikipedia.com (Anyone can change the information on a post, and yes I know that the changes are reviewed, but I also know that human error can occur in a source that is quickly becoming the next hitchhikers’ guide to the galaxy)
• Search feature

I would assume that when the primary reason for your app is to find information, you would include a search feature. Assumption’s a silly thing. WebArtisan must have been too busy inputing the different lists to create a predictive type search function. I’m not throwing a fit over this because, let’s be honest, if I can’t find what I’m looking for with this app, I’m not looking hard enough. The whole thing is a search feature that requires the user to scroll through the alphabet instead of typing the word in. Yes, this was a bit more time consuming, but only by seconds.

The David Says

This is a reasonably priced app that will help you eat healthier. It may still need the final kinks worked out, but this is not a forgotten app that will go months without an update. We are on version 1.6.2 already! Your list of additives will grow faster than the tumor that sits in the sidecar to your love of sodium nitrate injected ham sandwiches.

So, now you know, and knowing’s half the app. I give this app 4 stars. Why so high? This is an app that is useful and potentially good for the individual/society. Nice design. Outbound links to additional information expanding upon the database found within the app that I can access at the bottom of a well. 450+ food additives with good overviews.

But, let’s not forget the genius behind the apps. After all, they don’t simply appear out of thin air. Someone had the insight, the talent, and the capacity to create these iPhone apps so that we may use them to their full power.

Starting off our Developer Series, we have the medical talent behind Symptom MD, David Thompson, M.D. FACEP. We reviewed Symptom MD several weeks back with high commendations, knowing it to be a good insight into when you should self-treat or when it’s appropriate to seek medical attention. While your doctor’s advice and your good judgment should always take precedence over any guidelines, having Symptom MD can help you make clearer decisions. For those times when you’re not sure what to do when you twist your ankle, or if you should be concerned about the sinus congestion that has lingered for longer than three days, Symptom MD helps you make appropriate decisions on what level of medical care is needed, and how to provide symptom relief for minor illnesses and injuries at home.

As indicated by my glowing review of Symptom MD on Appstruck, I highly recommend it to others. Can you talk about why you made the decision to create Symptom MD? Where did the idea come from?

The iPhone is a remarkable device. It, like the internet, are transformative in the way that they are able to provide immediate access to information. People are looking for access to health information, in particular decision support; having medical advice at your fingertips is convenient for the person on the go, helps reduce stress, and may improve individuals’ health care decisions.

I found Symptom MD to be very straightforward and instinctual in its design. What inspired you to create this layout, and how did you design it?

The SymptomMD App has three main purposes. First, it is designed to help individuals determine if they are OR their child is sick. The second purpose is to help individuals decide when and if they need to call their doctor. And third, the App provides helpful information for treating symptoms of mild illness and minor injury. The layout reflects these three purposes with tabs for “Definition”, “When to Call”, and “Care Advice”.

Symptom MD bears a few striking similarities to WebMD’s symptom checker, which was released for the iPhone a year earlier, and is available for free through iTunes. When comparing their layouts and information, I noticed Symptom MD has a more authoritarian approach, directing the user specifically on what to do, including the various stages of calling the doctor. What made you choose this approach?

Both of the authors are practicing physicians and know through experience that sick or injured people want precise advice on how to alleviate their symptoms. SymptomMD is a decision-support tool not a decision-making tool. Individuals must use their best common sense when they are ill or injured. SymptomMD tries to provide helpful information to aid individuals’ natural common sense. As for which came first, SymptomMD has been available on hospital websites since 2001 and is updated yearly. (Please feel free to visit http://www.selfcare.info)

There are numerous medical apps for the iPhone, including iTriage, FirstAid, Epocrates, WebMD Mobile, and more. How do you feel Symptom MD stands apart?

Many of the Apps that are available focus more on Health Information. Our approach is to instead focus on symptoms and provide straightforward, usable, and actionable information. Also our the content on our App is a derivative of the clinical protocols we authored for use by nurse who staff medical helplines. The content has been tested in more that 15 million calls – so we have a lot of real life experience which has helped us fine tune these protocols.

What is your opinion on these other medical apps?

We think that ours is the most practical and helpful App for the sick or injured patient. Someone other than us needs to do the comparisons.

My father is a Physician, a Cardiologist for Kaiser Permanente, so in childhood I became familiarized with medical terminology, endowed with a premature medical prowess if you will, and thus have a different perspective from most laymen when faced with illnesses, symptoms, and the like. Did you create Symptom MD with this general population in mind as your demographic?

Absolutely. SymptomMD was created for the general population, that is, folks with no background in healthcare.

There are many doctors in the world today, of all different specialties and concentrations. What is your background and what kind of research went into the production of Symptom MD?

Dr. Schmitt is a board certified pediatrician. I am board certified in Internal Medicine and Emergency Medicine. Dr. Schmitt and I provide telephone triage protocols used by nurses in hundreds of medical call centers across the United States and Canada. These protocols are developed using published medical literature, reviewed by a panel of experts, and updated annually using feedback from medical call centers. The SymptomMD guidelines are directly derived from these telephone triage protocols. (Please feel free to visit www.stcc-triage.com)

Do you agree with the Alexander Pope’s adage that sometimes “too much information can be a dangerous thing” and that medical apps like iTriage, in their quest for consumer-driven healthcare, can lead patients in the wrong direction?

We believe that informed and empowered consumers will make better health care decisions. We also believe that the best source of individualized health information is the face-to-face encounter between a patient and his or her personal physician.

What were some challenges or difficulties you encountered in designing this app?

One of the most significant challenges was designing an easy to use interface for the small screen size limits of the iPhone. I think that with ITR’s input and assistance we were able to develop an application that is usable, readable, and, intuitive.

I would like to see the Dosage information expanded to include a wide range of prescription medications, or even have more symptoms included. Do you have any plans on expanding the information in Symptom MD? Potentially any future updates?

We may add additional information about common over-the-counter medications. We have no plans to add information about prescription drugs. We are certainly considering expanding the list of symptoms covered and may also add more detailed information on First Aid.

On a more philosophical note, I have countless conversations with my father about the present state of medicine and how it will change dramatically in the next few decades. How do you feel about the future of medicine, and doctors? We talk about doctors as we see them today changing vastly, with individualized medicine making breakthroughs.

I have no comment for your website on this topic. On a personal note, I feel positive about the direction medicine is heading, enjoy my patient care time, and am very glad that I chose medicine as a career.

I noticed in Symptom MD there aren’t many symptoms surrounding digestion or bowel movements. I always like to point out that tarry black stool is often a benign symptom of ingesting bismuth, an ingredient in Pepto Bismol, when most medical apps immediately highlight more extreme conditions, like anal cancer, colonic diverticulitis, or Crohn’s Disease, the latter of which affects only 1.5% of the population in North America. Black stool is more likely to be a case of upper GI bleeding than anal cancer. What do you suppose is the reason for this?

Dr. Schmitt has just completed the care guide “Stool, Unusual Color”. It will be added in an upcoming update.

Obviously, treatments for adults and children can differ greatly, but no other medical app I’ve seen, aside from First Aid, contains a specific section for children. Not to mention you also developed an app specifically for Pediatric care. Do you think Symptom MD will pull a greater interest from parents because of this?

An adage that is quoted within the medical community is that “children are not just small adults”. Doses for over-the-counter medications must be age-weight adjusted. The types and frequency of illnesses that can occur at age 1 month, 1 year, and 10 years, 30 years, and 60 years vary substantially. The causes, appropriate triage, and care advice for fever in a one month old is completely different than fever in a 25 year old. This is true for most symptoms (e.g., cough, earache, abdominal pain, chest pain). Parents love their children and want to do the best towards preserving or restoring their good health. I think the pediatric specific application will convey our advocacy of children’s health.

I always include a quirky anecdotal account in my reviews, just to make our readers identify with my writing and feel more casual. On a final and less serious note, what do you, illustrious Dr. David Thompson, do in your spare time when not creating iPhone apps of excellent caliber?

I enjoy outdoor activities like camping, canoeing, hiking. I have been actively involved in Scouting and have served as both a Cubmaster and a Scoutmaster.

the feared dictionary from iFear

If you have clinophobia, this is the iPhone app for you! Hippocampo, Qabiria and SavoirIT have created iFear, a comprehensive dictionary of fears, which surprisingly is not scary (unless you have technophobia). If you are a psychological hypochondriac then read on for hours of  masochistic self-analysing “fun”, if not then the app offers an extensive list and study guide to the most fears ranging from the mundane to the ridiculous.

Katagelophobia – the fear of being ridiculed.

iFear is an iPhone app that gives you options. The search feature is well thought out, allowing search of phobias, fear of… and tags. So if I have a fear of chickens – don’t judge, you don’t know what those flightless eggsitters can do – I can type “chicken” and the predictive search brings up all related results immediately. Why the urgency? Fear triggers adrenaline which means it’s time for a speedy delivery to bring you to understand why you want a fight or flight.  The developers could also have recognized the pragmatism of the predictive search.

Here’s the sick part. If I click on alektorophobia (the fear of chickens), the next screen lists the tags, additional names, notes and an image of the fear. Really? I’m deathly afraid of this pecking monster and you show me its cardiac-arresting deepfried thigh. I think I’m going to be sick. On the bright side, I am a little more knowledgable.

Epistemophobia: the fear of knowledge.

chickens - Aaak!

The second tab on the bottom of the screen is the about section. An interesting choice as I normally consider it the signature as the last option. This is purely self promotional of them. The remaining tabs are Quiz and Facts.

The quiz is randomly generated, which made me originally feel like a genius. I got ten questions right before I struck out. This is just multiple choice questions pertaining to the variety of amazing fears within iFear’s intangible pages. Questions such as “Is fear of death called Acousticophia?” give a simple yes or no option (the answer is No, but you could probably figure that out for yourself). My initial attempt gave me the same few fears again and again, making me choose which one is a social fear… Anthroomorphia, Theatrophobia, Ablutophobia? If you get three wrong the quiz is over.

The facts section should be the intro to the app for me. Yes, this is arbitrary ordering, so it won’t affect my score of the app. I would have liked to learn about the definition of the phobia, the ranges of phobias within an individual and the fact that “few of the terms in iFear’s dictionary are acually found in medical literature” (yes the typo was there too). This made me wonder: Who is this app for?

Originally I thought this may be a good study tool for a psychology student, but that statement threw me off. I think that this is a dictionary for the generally interested individual. This app allows you to delve into humanity and assume the frightened face of a kakorrhaphiophobe, or a levophobe. Despite the remaining mystery why someone would keep coming back to this app (I won’t judge, maybe there’s a fear of not knowing all the fears), it is well executed and served its purpose of informing me.

Now if only I can find an app to help rid me of my fears.

Ahem, let me step down from my all-natural, chemical-free soap-box, and give you the gist of 3rdWhale. It was created by 3^rd Whale Media Inc and lists green businesses in six categories – Health and Wellness, Food, Eco Travel, Retail, Transportation, and Service, so naturally I chose Transportation. Each category then lists subcategories; Transportation breaks down into bicycles, dealership and rental, fuel, public transit, and taxis, and as they didn’t mention seagoing vessels, obviously I chose bicycles. Then, you specify walking distance, biking distance, or driving distance to narrow your search results. The app gives you a map and listings based on GPS, but you can also search by zip code. 3^rd Whale is an ambitious app attempting to make every day a little greener.

I searched. I searched my heart out. I looked for cafes, groceries stores, bike shops, bookstores, you name it. And you know what I found? Not enough. The interface is quite easy to navigate, with a startup screen where you specify your options and bottom tabs for shopping green, tips for living green, a login feature (where you can add a business if it isn’t listed), and a search feature. However, this does not make up for the fact that I cannot find a single independent coffee shop within 20 miles of me; my green compass just wasn’t locating it. I walked a few blocks to my favorite local caffeine dealer. GPS? LMAO ASAP!

I then realized that the problem didn’t lie within the app. The problem was simply that there weren’t enough posts. This is partially due to the nature of the sustainable business niche. So here’s my catch-22: I would love to use this app once more people have updated it, but if everyone waits for others to update it, we will never use it. I’ll just bite the spear gun and do my part by updating my local sustainable businesses and pray that everyone else will join me. Then we can all hold hands and sing kumbaya around a recycled drum circle.

In my search-induced annoyance I navigated user-created posts by clicking the Live Green button on the bottom bar. Live updating streams of how to be a better human on our planet splashed me in the face with green knowledge. These are wonderfully helpful, but there is no search feature within them, so if you find something special hold on to it, otherwise it will be lost in the wake of the sustainable torrent flowing through it. I found a nice review on lightbulbs and quickly lost it later, never to find it again. I’m sure this will be fixed in the next version. This is quite nice though because it’s also user created content via CreativeCitizen.

So, overall, I was happy for my iPhone to catch 3rdWhale, despite my slight annoyance that it hasn’t fully grown in popularity yet. I’ll do my part, if you do yours (and if you do, this app gets a 5 star rating in my e-book).

Years later I still hold a great fascination for the human body, for both anatomy and physiology. While it was never my ambition to suffer through the MCAT, plough through years of medical school and residency and become a doctor, simply spending 20 years of my life with a doctor – an influential one at that – was enough to give me a solid interest in medical terminology and anatomy. For me, the iPhone app Speed Bones MD by Benoit Essiambre is a giant refresher course in the basics, and a tongue-twisting educational foray into the much more difficult skeletal anatomy that Med students have to know. Speed Bones MD is a great educational asset – a digital flashcard system, if you will – that any student studying physiology or anatomy or biomechanics could benefit from using, even if they’re not pre-Med.

Speed Bones opens with a wryly humorous drawing of a skeleton casually leaning against what looks to be a bovine skull, as if just daring you to begin the test. To start from the very beginning, tap the word Start near the top of the screen; otherwise, for those wanting a refresher course, you may choose from any of the 18 levels to practice. For the daredevils cracking their knuckles in breezy nonchalance over the difficulty of Speed Bones, to not underestimate so quickly. The game – I like to call it as such – covers many, many, many bones and their in-between spaces, and allots you roughly 10 seconds to label each identifier given. To select an answer, tap the screen on the bone part that corresponds with the name, and Speed Bones will award you points based on your precision and will even give you bonus points for a quicker response. For better accuracy, hold your finger down where you tap to enable a zoon function, so that you may better see where exactly your finger is pointing. All your high scores will be saved.

At first I was cocky, speeding through all the basic bones (a Fibula here, a Metacarpal there, now gimme an Ilium!), but once I hit Level 6 and started seeing phrases like Facet for Occipital Condyle, I started feeling a little out of my league. On the first level you have the entire skeleton pictured before you so you may identify larger bones like the humerus, the ulna and radius, the femur, the tibia and fibula, the patella, and various smaller bones in the hands and feet (tarsals, metatarsals, phalanges and so forth). The second level shows different sections of the spine, including a lateral view of the spinal column, and different vertebral cross-sections of the thoracic and lumbar regions, and other parts like the axis and atlas. The subsequent levels delve deeper into the more specific anatomical portions of the skull, back, arms, and so on. For anyone with a prior background – or plain common sense – in medical latin or basic biological viewpoint indicators like “lateral,” “medial,” “orbital” and “anterior” may be able to logically guess his way through a few levels. However, Speed Bones MD is definitely not a guessing game, and it takes serious practice and dedication to remember everything from start to finish.

For only $0.99, Speed Bones MD offers a course in skeletal anatomy for a much better price than those overpriced, high gloss, and colorfully laminated flashcards you find in college bookstores and Barnes & Nobles. These ones also won’t get lost, or crumpled, or put out of chronological order for ease of use. While the zoom feature and accuracy points can take some adjusting to – and curiously enough, may not be as accurate as the image on your test – Speed Bones MD is a great app for anyone on the high school, university, or medical school level who is seriously, or casually interested in learning about the skeleton and its many mysteries.

To better navigate these choppy seas of medical jargon, a medical iPhone app called Symptom MD by Self Care Decisions, LLC, is my choice of medical know-how for the layman. Many medical apps like iTriage, First Aid, Epocrates and WebMd offer almost too much information, inundating the viewer with details on symptoms, treatment plans, pharmaceuticals, and almost no information on how to distinguish between various conditions with symptomatic similarities. Possibly the greatest thing about Physicians most people take for granted is their position of authority, their booming voice of reason and direction for patients to unfalteringly follow. A great weakness of apps like iTriage is they provide no direction for the user, allowing all kinds of cerebral manifestations to muddle and possibly misinterpret to the wrong diagnosis.

To truly make a medical app more user-friendly and directional, it really should be – I guess you could say – whittled down to baby steps. Symptom MD bases its entire diagnosing process on searching by symptoms, allowing you to instinctively search for specific body areas, for a child or adult, where the symptoms are located. The search function covers all the body areas – head or brain, eye, ear, nose, mouth or teeth, neck or back, chest, abdomen, genitals or urinary, arm or leg, skin, and “other symptoms” category that covers mostly baby-related issues – and after selecting a body area, you are given a list of possible symptoms associated with this area. If you select “chest,” for a child, you are presented with the possibility of an asthma attack, chest pain, cough, croup, influenza, or wheezing (other than asthma). The app then leads you on a step-by-step questionnaire regarding symptom definitions [e.g. “Is this your child’s symptom” – pain or discomfort in the chest (front or back)]; you select the appropriate pathways and depending on what other symptoms you deem accurate, the app will recommend you to either call 911 immediately, call your doctor now or go to an ER, call your doctor within 24 hours, call your doctor during the weekday, or recommend you to administer self care at home. For the more urgent requests, the app will link you to a “Call Your Doctor” button, where, obviously, you have the nice option of saving your Physician’s information.

Symptom MD also includes other pertinent and helpful information, such as the dosage information on several common drugs – Acetaminophen, Diphenhydramine, Chloropheniramine, Dextromethorphan, Ibuprofen, Pseudoephedrine – and also covers special topics like Cough and Cold Medicines of 2009, Fever Myths and Facts, Infection Exposure Questions, etc. There is also a handy direct button to cal 911 or your local emergency room.

While your doctor’s advice and your good judgment should always take precedence over any guidelines, having Symptom MD for $2.99 can help you make clearer decisions. For those times when you’re not sure what to do when you twist your ankle, or if you should be concerned about the sinus congestion that has lingered for longer than three days, Symptom MD helps you make appropriate decisions on what level of medical care is needed, and how to provide symptom relief for minor illnesses and injuries at home.

*Medical authors for Symptom MD are David A. Thompson, M.D., F.A.C.E.P for Adult content and Barton D. Schmitt, M.D., F.A.A.P. for Pediatric content.

Consumer-driven health care has received recent attention as a fundamentally new approach to organizing the financing and delivery of health care. Consumer-driven health care consists of tax-advantaged health savings accounts, coupled with high-deductible health plans, which theoretically would make consumers more prudent in seeking health care services. Since they would be paying much more out of their own pockets, insurance would be relegated only to those procedures of true catastrophic expense. The idea is that as patients become accustomed to shopping for health care services, they would focus more on quality and service, leading clinicians to become market responsive, thus improving the care they provide, and actively competing for the business of increasingly savvy customers.

This consumer experience increases the patient’s sense of empowerment, because he has direct input into decisions about his healthcare, with the knowledge and tools he needs to make those decisions; however, quid pro quo, the consumer must now be held accountable for the financial or medical consequences of his decisions. One could argue that with this health care model, the patient not only develops a sense of empowerment, but a sense of entitlement over this newfound capacity to take control of his health.

iTriage was founded by Dr. Peter Hudson and Dr. Wayne Guerra with the idea that the medicine world acts too much like a hierarchy of knowledge, inefficiently providing information and inefficiently allocating resources to its patients. With iTriage, their hope is to empower patients by providing relevant information, structured data, and service offerings to patients, anywhere they happen to be at their time of need, all for free on the iPhone.

iTriage, obviously, is not meant to replace a primary physician’s care, but is meant to enhance it with an efficient and cost-effective alternative to minor medical problems. After quickly registering through Healthagen (iTriage website), the app is structured with five tabs along the bottom, which indicate Symptoms, Diseases, Procedures, Facilities, and a Help tab. Each tab provides users with seemingly thousands of different symptoms, diseases, and medical procedures for users to research according to what ails them. The listings are all in alphabetical order with a search tab for ease of use; too bad there isn’t a handy Alphabet list along the side so users may search by letter family, especially since rifling through this huge compendium is incredibly daunting. All the information and methodology present is meant for the user to glean so he may be fully privy to what his Physician says or recommends, and then be able to decide his own course of action.

Say your Physician wants to perform a Percutaneous transluminal coronary. Instead of feeling your eyes glaze over with your heart pumping wildly in confusion, you can search for the procedure on iTriage to better understand your choice. Tapping the procedure name, iTriage gives you several tabs, covering the description, the specialist division (i.e. cardiology), possible complications, and the average cost of the procedure. It also gives you a link to a few reputed medical websites like WebMd and MayoClinic, a tab to find a facility – along with a search radius of up to 50 miles and appropriate mapped directions -, and even a direct advice line to either a physician or nurse. One of iTriage’s Partners is TelaDoc, a national network of board-certified physicians who provide telephone consultations to diagnose, recommend treatment, or write short-term prescriptions 24/7. With this, you always have a second opinion at hand, just in case you are unsure about that percutaneous transluminal coronary – which, by the way, is described by iTriage as “a procedure to open clogged or blocked arteries. A catheter is positioned in the narrowed coronary artery, with a tiny balloon at its tip. The balloon is then inflated and deflated sequentially to stretch or break open the narrowing and improve the opening and passage for blood flow.” A nice, layman description with a glossary should you be unsure about certain medical jargon.

Unfortunately, the caveat of providing patients with such knowledge is one of personal liability. Should the layman, with no medical school training, really be given the opportunity to direct or make suggestions to his physician? With the advent of the Internet, it has been all too easy for people to search for symptoms in an attempt at self-treating, often resulting in mistakes, or worse, dire consequences. A common example would be that of the vaginal yeast infection, also known medically as Candidosis. A fairly common fungal infection from an overgrowth of the normally harmless Candida albicans, a yeast infection’s symptoms of redness, itching and discomfort, and odorous discharge are often indistinguishable from other conditions like Bacterial vaginosis and Trichomoniasis. So, when women (or men), try to treat their surmised yeast infection with common over-the-counter antifungal prescriptions like Monistat, they could be delaying diagnosis of a different problem, such as a bacterial vaginal infection or even a sexually transmitted disease (STD). One study found that about 2 out of 3 women who think they have a simple yeast infection don’t.

Going along with the fear-mongered society our current American culture has been, sometimes having an endless array of information at our fingertips, an education of autodidactic dilettantism, results in being over-educated while ironically being under-educated. Say you display a symptom of black stools. Seeing black stools is incredibly scary, is it not? You immediately jump to conclusions like “what did I eat,” “is there something wrong with my gastrointestinal tract?” and so on. In this case, should you look up “black stool” on iTriage’s Symptoms list, you will be faced with an array of incredibly scary sounding conditions like Anal Cancer (at the top of the list!), Anal Fissure, Colonic diverticulitis, Small Bowel lymphoma. True, all of these result in a symptom of black stools, but they are all incredibly dire situations to immediately thrust in your face, especially if you do not fall into the usual demographic, particularly age group. Nowhere does iTriage say that black stools are a common side effect of ingesting benign Pepto Bismol – its main ingredient bismuth interacts chemically with sulfur compounds within the body during digestion, resulting in tar black stool, and is far more likely than a sudden onset of deep hemorrhaging in your intestines or anal canal.

iTriage is certainly useful when, as a patient, you try to navigate the choppy seas of medical jargon as a Physician explains a procedure or condition. Rather than searching haphazardly over the Internet for what may be a reputable source of information, iTriage provides you with accurate information up-front, in an easily searchable database, and gives you directions to the closest medical facility where you may obtain direct assistance. It also helps you negotiate medical bills through its partnership with Coalition America, to help you save money.

So rather than using iTriage as a source to correct your doctor or misdiagnose yourself, use it as a way to better elucidate your doctor’s suggestions. No Physician wants to hear objections from a misguided but well-intentioned patient, as he sticks out his chin in defiance with iPhone in hand protesting. As the old adage says, “A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

I must admit, the app is very cool in principle. Firstly, using GPS to find things nearby, it gives you information on the consumer resource of your choice, and secondly, each item is represented by nifty yellow road signs carrying a symbol of whatever item it is you seek, whether that be a letter P symbolizing parking, a fork and knife symbolizing a restaurant, and so forth. Should you seek a gas station, by clicking on the icon, you are immediately directed to a page with all the closest stations in your vicinity. To make matters easier, you can change your search radius from 0.1 up to 15 miles away. You could also switch the search results from Rating to Distance if you feel proximity bears more importance than quality. Like a social networking site, iWant also displays a rating system of 1-5 stars that it formulates based on outside rating sites, like Yelp! or Yahoo! Local, which it links to under the “Reviews” tab. iWant also gives you the phone number and directions based on your current location.

iWant by Rudrajit Samanta provides all types of needs, from pharmacies to hospitals, restaurants to cafes, movie theaters and current movies playing, clothing and hotels and bookstores, to citizen and public needs like banks, taxi services, and police. If all else fails, there is a magnifying glass icon you click to search for a business. And while I’m still not quite sure why they have this additional feature, there are also two icons for using Wikipedia and local blogs.

Sounds perfect, does it not? Too bad it’s a little hard to translate the symbols on the yellow road sign icons; while cute and clever, I doubt anyone would think the four stacked oil refinery pipes with an arrow shooting out of the far left are actually nails to represent a nail salon. Or the fact that the martini glass symbol doesn’t simply give you “bars” but all kinds of nightlife.

Aside from this small pictorial quirk, iWant provides you with what you what quickly and efficiently, with directions never failing and reviews usually on the mark. I want iWant.