Self-Managing Your Health - Your Team and Using the Internet

[shelley]

Self-Managing Your Health
At no other time in our history has it been easier to manage one’s own health. Thanks to the Internet, you can get testimonials, anecdotal evidence, and read white papers in just an instant. You can find others like yourself who are cleansing, trying to cure rare diseases, etc. The first thing you want to do in order to self-manage your health is educate yourself. That means:
--- Collecting and reading/viewing good material sources
--- Consulting experienced, well-read people
A good CEO isn’t expected to know everything, but they are expected to know whether their advisors are knowledgeable. In fact, I’d say it’s much more important to have a good bullshit detector than to be a trivia expert. A good CEO would never allow someone else to direct their company, and neither should we allow others to willy-nilly direct the course of our lives and bodies.
Think of everyone from the most important specialists to your best friends as being part of your team of consultants– the better team you have, the more IQ you have to draw upon. Try to use them equally, as if they’re all sitting with you at a round table. Sure you can keep your faves on your right hand, but for a good balance and for checks and balances, be sure to keep someone from the opposite camp on the other side of the table. I must admit I am biased towards certain alternative health modalities, but I value good regular doctors too.
Writers of good books can be consultants too – such as Deepak Chopra, or Louise L. Hay, or Weston A. Price, just be open to reading new sources each year or as your personal timing permits.

Research Via the Internet
Google is the home page for my Internet browser. It is the best search engine, accept no substitutes.
When you wish to find information on a particular subject, simply type in the words or phrases (“key words,” “key phrases”) that should appear on the type of document you wish to read. For instance, if I wanted to find out the dangers of soy, I would enter the key words: Soy, Dangers, binds, inhibits, hormones.
Now, say I didn’t know anything about the dangers of soy. I’d have a much different list of keywords: Soy, Dangers, maybe even “bad.” The first pages I look at should list some of the dangers, so I can do another search with some of the new words I just found and refine my search, get pages more in gear.
If you’re looking for a word that is a common synonym so that you get all kinds of pages, not just health, try combining it with another word and put double-quotation marks around them both. One time I taught a class on the Internet and a student put in the word “Swing” because she wanted to take a swing dancing class. Guess what kind of swinging came up? She turned beet red and I had her input “swing dancing” in double quotes.
When you find a page that has the word you’re interested in, it may be buried. That’s when you want to use the “find on this page” option. The keyboard command is the Ctrl key plus the F key. Press and hold the Ctrl key and tap the F key and a little search window should appear. Type or paste the word in the text box and press the Enter key and keep pressing it until you have found all instances of the word on the page.
You don’t always have to search for a page, you can often guess what the address is, especially if the address is the name of a company or product or government site.
I’m sure you’ve noticed that most addresses end with a “.com.” The “com” stands for commercial, meaning this is a commercial site. There are others:

.com Commercial site, business for profit
.org Non-profit business e.g., consumerreports.org
.gov Government site, e.g., dmv.gov
.ca or .co or .uk etc. State, province or country of origin, e.g., dmv.ca.gov for Califonria’s DMV.
Many times your searches will take you to a document without a link to the main, home page. There’s an easy fix for this, simply edit the address. For instance, www.tvguide.com/listings is the page for viewing listings. You can easily delete the “/listings” part of the address and get to the home page. Anything after the “.com” is a child of the home page.

As always, when conducting research, remember to consider the source. For instance, if you're reading about the benefits of coral calcium from a company that sells coral calcium, you should also read about coral calcium from someone who knows the chemistry behind calcium and isn't trying to sell you on something. You might find out that it doesn't matter at all where the calcium comes from - and it doesn't.

Hope that helps!