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About and FAQ
Hidola is a personalized health and medical information search engine.
It is not a medical diagnosis or decision making tool.
Our goal is to make health and medical information easily accessible to facilitate people's daily lives.
Hidola currently provides two functions: searching health products and searching health information.
To search health products,
input one or more keywords about your health situation into the search box
and click the button entitled "Search Health Products" on the home page.
Then you will reach a series of Web pages listing health products.
- For each listed health product, you can click the corresponding link
to see its detailed description on Amazon.com. You also have the option to buy it from Amazon.com.
- If you want to start a completely new search, you are advised to click either the orange Hidola logo located at the top of each page
or the orange "start over" link located near the bottom of each page.
To control your health product search at a finer granularity,
input one or more keywords about your health situation into the search box
and click the button entitled "Refined Search" on the home page.
Then Hidola will use a few selection lists to guide your entire health product search process:
- Initially, you are shown a short list of health conditions matching the keywords you entered.
(This step is skipped in certain cases.)
If you cannot find your health condition(s) on the list, you are advised to go back to the home page.
There, you can either perform another keyword search or click the blue "List of health conditions" link
on the right side to reach the list of all available health conditions.
- From the health condition list, select one or more health conditions.
Then by clicking the "Next" button,
you will reach either a symptom list or a series of Web pages listing health products.
- From the symptom list, select zero or more symptoms.
Then by clicking the "Next" button, you will reach a series of Web pages listing health products.
- For each listed health product, you can click the corresponding link
to see its detailed description on Amazon.com. You also have the option to buy it from Amazon.com.
- If you want to start a completely new search, you are advised to click either the orange Hidola logo located at the top of each page
or the orange "start over" link located near the bottom of each page.
To search health information,
click the orange "Symptom search" link on the right side of the home page. Then
Hidola will use a questionnaire to guide your entire symptom search process:
- Initially, you are shown a short symptom list containing commonly encountered symptoms.
If you cannot find your symptom(s) on the list, you can click the "more symptoms" link
according to your affected body region to see a more comprehensive symptom list.
- From the symptom list, select one or more symptoms describing your health situation.
Then by clicking the "Next" button,
you will reach zero or more pages asking questions related to your selected symptoms.
- After answering all questions posed by our system,
you will reach a page listing possible causes of your selected symptoms.
All of these causes are ranked by a medical expert system
using medical textbook sources and publicly available information.
For each such cause, its link takes you to a Web page describing it.
Moreover, if you click the corresponding "More pages" button,
you can reach additional Web pages describing the cause.
- At any time, if you have made incorrect selections, do not know which symptoms to select,
or cannot answer a question, you can click the red "guided help" link
located near the bottom left of the page to invoke our help function.
You will be prompted to describe your health situation.
Then by clicking the "Find relevance of unselected symptoms and alternate responses" button,
you will see two lists containing our help information,
one for relevance of unselected symptoms
and the other for relevance of alternate responses (to your selections).
The contents of these lists are ranked by our system using medical information retrieval techniques.
Here are some tips for searching health information:
- If you have many symptoms, it may not be wise to select all of them in the symptom list simultaneously.
Otherwise Hidola cannot know which of these symptoms are the most important ones, may lose focus,
and thus has to return to you a large number of diseases,
many of which may be unrelated to your health situation.
To maximize your speed in finding desired information, it is generally a good strategy to start with your
chief complaint, i.e., the one or two symptoms that bother you the most.
If you cannot find desired information using your chief complaint,
you can continue to search using your other symptoms.
At any time, you are advised to select no more than three symptoms in the symptom list simultaneously
to keep your search focused.
- When looking for a symptom, you should start from the short symptom list containing commonly encountered symptoms.
If you cannot find your desired symptom there, you can click the "more symptoms" link
according to your affected body region to see a more comprehensive symptom list.
If you still cannot find your desired symptom there, you can click the "more generalized symptoms" link
to see another more comprehensive symptom list. In case this still does not work,
you can click all the "more symptoms" links to see all the available symptoms.
- When you are unsure whether you should select a particular answer to a question,
you can click the red "guided help" link located near the bottom left of the page to invoke our help function.
If you are still unsure after using our help function, then select this answer.
- When you reach a disease in a search result page and have question on why this disease is related to your symptom,
you can perform a search by inputting both this disease and your symptom as keywords into the keyword search box
located near the top of the search result page.
This may help you find Web pages explaining the relationship between this disease and your symptom.
- If you want to start a completely new search, you are advised to click the orange "start over" link located near the bottom of each page.
In case that you use the browser's back button to return to Hidola's symptom search page,
please remember that the browser still keeps your previously selected symptoms in the symptom list checked.
If those symptoms are not needed in the new search, you need to uncheck them.
Hidola is developed and maintained by the self-funded GuidedMed Corporation,
which is located in the suburb of New York City, United States of America.
Our financial resources are advertisement and donations.
Advertisement is clearly displayed as such.
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