Want to Stay Healthy This Winter? Try Medical Apps

Your head hurts. Your nose is stuffy. Your throat feels like you’ve scratched it with an emery board. Now what? Pick up your iPad.

Pick up your iPad?

Believe it or not, the answer may well lie there, especially for those who want an aspirin-cough-medicine-lozenge-free winter. According to a story by Megan O’Neill at appolicious.com, there are several great iPhone applications worth exploring. Don’t, of course, forget about doctors visits, as needed, O’Neill notes, but there are quite a few good alternative medicine options available as well.

One app is the Home Natural Remedies. It may be the best $0.99 you’ll ever spend. O’Neill says it’s “best described as an encyclopedia of alternative medical treatments, alphabetized by ailment.” And it’s not just limited to sore throats and stomach-aches. If your problem is anxiety, for example, the app offers a half-dozen options to curb the problem, like meditating or taking deep breaths.  And it doesn’t stop there. It includes information on “everything from vertigo to bed wetting,” and users can bookmark anything they might want to see later.

Another alternative medicine app is iTherapy which goes for $1.99, which includes what kinds of treatments are available for a wide variety of medical complaints and a comprehensive list of therapies, including who benefits best from each, according to O’Neill.

There’s even a do-it-yourself app for massage or acupuncture. The $0.99 Ancient Remedies app describes mini-treatments that can be used anywhere, says O’Neill. The app includes the image of a human body, and users are asked to indicate the exact area where pain or discomfort is coming from. Then you actually apply the iPhone to your body, and the smartphone shoots off vibrations to relieve pressure points, according to O’Neill.

Another app (and it’s free!) is Live Happy, which helps users zero in on the positives in their lives through a serious of exercises. The app helps you do a quick checklist of where you are now – including what you are thankful for and where you can improve – and where you would like to be in the coming years, O’Neill writes.

Yet another app, The Long Deep Breathing app ($0.99) teaches users deep breathing exercises while explaing how to adjust to the length of each breath and the length of the entire exercise, according to O’Neill.

But don’t stop there. For those who want to take their breathing a step further, O’Neill writes, there is the $2.99 Guided Insight Meditation app, which offers a brief audio introduction to meditation, and instructions on how to use and best practice it.

And here’s a great reason why you should take (some) medical treatments into your own hands. A 2010 study found that “physicians don't know much more about complementary and alternative medicine than their patients do,” according to a story by Crystal Phend at medpagetoday.com. Even worse, she writes, almost 50 percent of the clinicians responding to the survey rated their own knowledge about herbal medicines as "quite" or "very" poor (36.2 percent and 10.4 percent, respectively).

Which is not to say that you should never go to a doctor again, just that it’s a good idea to also look at other ways of getting and staying healthy.