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Web site can lessen worries Jul 03, 2007 12:00 AM A A Give me a symptom. Tell me something that's bothering you right now. How about difficulty swallowing? Any issues there? Periodic dizziness perhaps? Knee pain? Have you seen the magazine advertisement featuring the backsides of two naked men (with exposed musculoskeletal and nervous systems)? These two guys are talking and one says, "Hey Doug, I have burning, stabbing, shooting pain. Is that muscle pain?" (Don't worry about the fully exposed part, this is all simulated). The guy with the well-delineated buttocks is holding some data in his hand and says, in response to the question, "No Phil that sounds like nerve pain, to find relief ..." Did I get your attention? So, how do you find relief for those irritating, hard-to explain symptoms that are incredibly real but difficult to pin down, too tough to even put into the right words. Possible solution — just maybe, it's www.revolutionhealth.com, a Web site founded by Steve Case, the same person responsible for giving us the rather-famous aol.com. I'm quite attached to the health-information Web sites I already use. I trust them, plus I work for a university so I have a yearning for information that's science-based. Sometimes that's hard to come by on the worldwide Web. In my world, university-affiliated health Web sites are the most reliable. I'm skeptical of anything else. That said, this "revolutionary" Web site got my attention. It was Revolution Health's Symptom Checker that grabbed me. It encourages us to identify a health-related condition we're worried about and go through a set of queries. At the end there are options that identify just what the condition might be. The Web site is not as well populated as you might prefer, just "common causes of most common symptoms" and it's no substitute for a visit to a health provider for a formal diagnosis, but perhaps you could think of it as your own personal decision tree so you can contemplate a worrisome health issue more logically. I tried the Symptom Checker and liked it. It stopped me from over-reacting to a pain in my foot and I was reminded in the process that a baking soda soak works wonders. My feet feeling better, I moved on to the "Know Your Risk" assessment. There are two versions and I took the "quick," less complicated one. It told me I have a 1 in 14 person chance of having a heart attack, a stroke or developing diabetes, and I could reduce that to 1 in 16 by making a few lifestyle changes. It pointed me toward some articles and introduced me to health and fitness blogging, which I'd not really contemplated before. The idea is actually rather intriguing. I didn't see anything truly revolutionary on this Web site in terms of preventive health care, but it did get me thinking. Maybe that's the revolution, creating a friendly, beckoning portal for each of us to pass through, a place where we begin to think (at all or more clearly) about certain aspects of our individual health. I like this idea more and more. Because, after all, once you've joined a revolution, things usually end up changing. Be well. Sharon Johnson is an associate professor in the College of Health and Human Sciences at Oregon State University and on the faculty of the OSU Extension Service. She can be reached at [email protected]