The Health Wisdom Blog™ (by OrganizedWisdom)

Got Great Health Links? Nominate Them on OrganizedWisdom!

A few months ago, I wrote about OrganizedWisdom's ongoing mission to curate great health information. We know that this process doesn't begin and end with our team, and now we have better tools to get outside input.

We cordially invite all of the health experts out there - from doctors and nurses, to students and researchers, to patients and caregivers, to bloggers and librarians - to contribute to our mission by reviewing the "top 10 resources" lists within our WisdomCards and nominating health resources to round out the list of web pages we recommend.

You'll notice that many of our top 10 lists don't always have 10 individual links listed. That's by design. If we haven't uncovered 10 high quality, unique health links during the WisdomCard creation process, we'll intentionally leave room for nominations.

OrganizedWisdom's own team of experts reviews each and every nomination, and if the link is approved it will join our top 10.

Every day we get dozens, sometimes hundreds, of amazing link suggestions. The team at the University of Maryland Medical Center website recently visited OrganizedWisdom and nominated a number of links. Here is an example of one of many instances where their high quality health information made an excellent addition to a WisdomCard: http://organizedwisdom.com/Chronic_Shoulder_Pain (see their helpful video podcast at #9 on the top 10 resources list).

Here's how to nominate your own favorite resource:

1. Search OrganizedWisdom to find a WisdomCard that is the best fit for the subject of your link.
2. Go to that WisdomCard, review the top 10 resources list. If your favorite resource isn't already mentioned, nominate your link. (See sample form at right.)
3. Fill out the form; hit submit. We'll let you know if it's been approved. It's that easy!

Why don't you visit OrganizedWisdom and nominate your favorite health links today?

Take a Power Nap to Lose Weight, Look Younger, and Feel Better Fast!

It's too bad the Spanish concept of the siesta never caught on in the U.S.A. We might all be a lot better off.

OrganizedWisdom's sleep advisor, Michael Breus, Ph.D., author of Beauty Sleep, tells us that napping offers all of the wonderful benefits of a good night's sleep. So if you can't always get a decent snooze, a nap can help give your body a mini reboot.

If you feel like you can't nap because you wake up feeling groggy and disoriented, guess what? You're doing it wrong!

Here are Dr. Breus's 10 steps to a perfect power nap. You'll learn how to give it a try today (right at your desk), and see if your brain and body work a little better 20 minutes later!

Also, be sure to check out our questions and answers with Dr. Breus about sleep disorders and insomnia. It's all part of OrganizedWisdom Expert Answers series where we seek out professional advice to address the most highly searched real-life FAQs!

Sleepless? Dr. Michael Breus Shares His Expert Answers to Common Sleep Disorder Questions!

Between swine flu panic, economic turmoil, and information overload it's possible that you, like many Americans, might be losing precious sleep.

Of course, sleeplessness itself is genuinely something to worry about, as it can increase your risk for hypertension, among other illnesses. 

Well, help is on the way. OrganizedWisdom just found answers to some of the most common sleep disorder questions from sleep specialist Michael Breus, Ph.D., and his helpful book Beauty Sleep. It's all part of our new OrganizedWisdom Expert Answers series where we seek out professional advice to address the most highly searched real-life FAQs!

Read Dr. Breus' words of wisdom and start sleeping better tonight:

1. Is sleep debt reversable? Can I bank sleep for later?
2. Does the amount of sleep we need really decrease as we age, or is it hearsay?
3. Can I get physically sick from lack of sleep?
4. Is a high-end mattress worth it?
5. Can I actually smell in my sleep? I've seen products that claim to help me stay asleep with special scents. Is that true?
6. Is melatonin safe to take every night?
7. I sleep a lot more during the winter months and have a harder time feeling motivated in general. What's going on?
8. Is it ever okay to keep a small stock of sleeping pills in the medicine chest just in case?
9. Is it ever okay to use alcohol as a nightcap?
10. Is it okay to let my body sleep as much as it wants during a vacation?

Browse our new slideshows: famous fictional shrinks, celebrities with mental illness, and the best foods for your mood.

Sometimes you're itching to read and research, sometimes you just want to flip through pictures and captions. We know. We're like that, too. That's why the OrganizedWisdom team is so happy to announce the arrival of our latest project -- slideshows.

Here are our first three installments. Happy browsing:

Famous Fictional Shrinks
They can make you laugh, they can make you cry, but they can't actually write you a prescription. From Dr. Melfi to Frasier Crane, you're sure to find your favorite on-screen psychiatrist on our list.

Celebrities with Mental Illness
Everyone has their ups and downs. It's reassuring to know that even the biggest stars are no exception. Find out which conditions celebs like Mel Gibson, Axl Rose, and rapper DMX deal with daily.

The Best Foods to Boost Your Mood
Not only are salmon, lobster, and chocolate delicious, they're natural "uppers." Be sure to add these foods to your grocery list for the ultimate feel-good pantry!

(Be sure to drop us a line here if we've missed any great items in our lists above. Thanks!)

Have you had these questions? Now, we've got answers!

 Have you ever wondered:

• How will bipolar disorder affect my relationship?
• Is gaining weight part of bipolar disorder?
• Why do I have trouble sleeping?

If you're one of the 5.7 adult Americans with bipolar disorder, these are likely the same questions you asked when you were first diagnosed. And how do we know that? They're some of the questions we see coming up in the search queries we look at every day, and we thought it was time they got answered!

You see, OrganizedWisdom is taking our focus -- helping people find the health information they're seeking -- to the next level. Our new Frequently Asked Questions section (see our first installment, Bipolar 101) invites doctors and other qualified medical professionals to help answer these hot questions while directing users to WisdomCards loaded with helpful resources.

We invite you to flip through these new FAQs, tell a mental health professional you know to submit a response, and share with friends or family members who live with this condition.
 
And don't forget to tell us what you think. Please share your feedback here!

OrganizedWisdom Launches Improved Site Navigation and WisdomCollections

Sometimes small innovations make the biggest difference. The OrganizedWisdom team tries to make tweaks and enhancements each week that hopefully translate to better results for our users.

I'm happy to announce two such features that we're beta testing.

Navigation Frames: Making It Easy to Search Multiple Health Resources
Frames? Yes, they were big early in Web 1.0, and we're bringing them back. Why? Well, for an "assisted search" site, we realized that once users clicked on one of the resources on our pages, we weren't really assisting them as they continued their research.  Since we know that people searching for health information often visit 10 Web sites or more, we wanted to make this process as easy as possible. So now, if you visit a WisdomCard on any topic, and click on one of the many links to great resources, you'll find we've added a navigation frame that helps users quickly and easily search, or return to our site, for more information.

Our goal is to provide a health search service that is like having a doctor in the family.  So design changes and improvements like this are intended to make for good "deskside manner." We're holding a user's hand through the research process, and making it even easier to get to the next great resource on our list.

WisdomCollections: Making It Simple to Research Your Condition
OrganizedWisdom helps people do health research by creating hand-crafted WisdomCards--full of expert-selected online resources--on thousands of popular search terms. One of our challenges has always been to make it as easy as possible for people to find all of the WisdomCards we have to offer on a particular subject matter, especially now that we cover more than 16,000 topics. So we've just launched WisdomCollections to address this issue. 

Our new WisdomCollections round up all of the assorted WisdomCards related to a common condition or health issue, and display those resources in groupings that are easy to browse and navigate. You can jump from getting the latest news on your condition, to looking up drugs, to investigating various surgeries and procedures, to finding out which celebrities have the same illness. We now offer WisdomCollections on popular topics like breast cancer, HPV, high cholesterol, anxiety, and diabetes, and plan to roll out several hundred WisdomCollections in the coming weeks and months.

As always, we'd love to hear from you so we can keep making improvements to our service. Please share your comments below or email me.

WisdomCards Get Footnotes and Citations to Enhance Credibility

Every week we ask our product team and Health Guides these questions:

How can we improve the quality of our service? And what can we do to make our content better, more useful, and more credible for our users?

And each week, we try to implement at least one innovation or improvement based on this feedback, the various suggestions from our users, and trends we glean from various usability tests and data analysis.

One area we've spent the most time working on is finding ways to improve the quality and credibility of each fact referenced on our WisdomCards.  Of course we already review each WisdomCard and link to useful and credible resources.  But we're making one major adjustment that we think adds a tremendous amount of credibility and transparency to the content on our WisdomCards: we've just unveiled (and our Guides are now hard at work at implementing across the OrganizedWisdom Library of over 10,000 WisdomCards) references, citations and footnotes to our WisdomCards.

This is a work in progress and will take some time to implement site wide, but you can see some examples on these WisdomCards:

• Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma
• Pick's Disease Treatment
• Vitamin C

As always, thanks for your feedback and if you have other suggestions for how we can keep improving the quality of our service please let us know.

OrganizedWisdom Launches Search Box Widgets; Any Site Can Now Feature Co-Branded WisdomCards

We're excited to share several new OrganizedWisdom Search Box Widgets and Badges anyone can use to feature WisdomCards on your site, blog, or myspace page.  This makes it easy for your users to find the most useful resources on any health topic directly from your site.

We've already been working with several health sites, hospital portals and health foundations to make our WisdomCards easily accessible from their Web sites, but now anyone can easily link to a WisdomCard or feature our WisdomCard Library on their own blog, health site or social networking profile.

These badges and widgets only take a few seconds to embed.  They are as easy to upload as popping up a YouTube video.  And if you want a co-branded version all you have to do is send us your logo and domain name and we will add co-branding to the WisdomCards so they also feature your logo.

Here are some examples of the badges, but check this page for a complete list and to grab the code for your site today.

Check here for additional options and sizes.

Easy Access to Related WisdomCards

Every WisdomCard on OrganizedWisdom features a handy list of related WisdomCards to help you explore topics that may shed light on your original search.

Now we've moved the top three up to the right column, so you can move right away if you realize that one of these terms is closer to the one you want.

It's a little change, but we like it -- and we hope you will too.

Find What You're Looking For With OW Search Suggest

OrganizedWisdom now offers a "search suggest" feature to help you refine your searches and point you toward WisdomCards you might not even know we had! I could explain how it works, but a picture does a better job:

Give it a try and see for yourself -- I find it makes my searches on OW a lot faster!