Information Center Health

Hot on the heels of our expansion into mental health-related and health-related Facebook apps, the CR Health Net team is now leading the way in delivering practically up-to-the-minute medication information for consumers and health professionals, straight from the US Food and Drug Administration.

Eagle-eyed readers might have noticed that just a couple of weeks ago, we replaced our aging mental health medications section with a new and greatly expanded collection of information on over 100 drugs commonly used in several areas of mental health:

(We didn’t erase the existing section, just moved it over to our supplementary reference library at CR Extras.)

Where did all that new information come from? It came straight from the horse’s mouth — directly from the respective medication manufacturers’ submissions to the US Food and Drug Administration. This means that the new information is as authoritative as you can get: this is the real deal, straight from the folks whose legal responsibility it is to inform and disclose what you need to know about medications. This is the type of information, submitted under the FDA’s Structured Product Labeling standard, which doctors use to prescribe, which informed consumers use to further educate themselves about their own treatment — and which, like it or not, lawyers use to litigate. (It also means that the information now has something of a US-centric skew, whereas our previous information was a mix of FDA information and highlights culled from the British National Formulary.)

The web is full of medication monographs, sometimes provided without citation or other indication of authorship, and often accompanied by a timestamp reflecting not when it was actually written but rather when it was last reviewed by an editor who may or may not have been any more medically qualified than your local newspaper delivery boy. The fact is that even most individual physicians are not well placed to undertake the type of extensive review and assessment of the latest medication information that is the bread and butter of the FDA’s work; certainly neither psychologists nor counsellors would call themselves well positioned to do so either.

So, we’ve decided to move entirely away from the “one man and his dog” style of medication overview and toward this type of authoritative, timely, in-depth material instead. And we haven’t made the change just for CounsellingResource.com. Over the last few weeks, the CR Health Net team have been busy rolling out a whole new set of focused sites to deliver the very latest medication information available under the SPL initiative:

And finally, there’s one other — one which, frankly, is a bit odd… Due to an accident of history and politics dating back to the early part of the last century, the US FDA actually permits homeopathic remedies to be distributed and used as long as they are included in a particular book produced by the field. This is despite the fact that they don’t have to undergo any testing of any kind and despite the fact that the FDA is unaware of any evidence to support homeopathic remedies as effective.

So, we’ve decided that if folks are going to use homeopathic remedies anyway, it’s better to have the information about them available in a clear and accessible way:

So there you have it: the latest expansion from our work on CounsellingResource.com to the broader CR Health Net system. You might remember our announcement back in May of several new Facebook apps built around our existing set of mental health and relationship quizzes. (See “Facebook App Development Team Brings Psychological Quizzes to Facebook”.) Those arrived thanks to the work of partner site CR Health Apps. They’re still going strong, so please be sure to stop by CounsellingResource.com on Facebook if you’d like to take them for a spin!