Dr. Palm

In this two-part series, Ashish Gupta tells you how your Palm handheld computer can become your family doctor and personal fitness trainer

First Aid 2002

Confused about what to do when your baby is unwell? Ever wondered how to treat a first-degree burn? Or the Heimlich maneuver? First Aid has it all for you conveniently placed in the palm of your hand. Refer to this database of information in the golden moments before medical aid can arrive. You might just save a life.

ePocrates Rx

Used by over 6,50,000 healthcare professionals, ePocrates Rx is the most easy-to-use, comprehensive and widely adopted drug reference for Palm OS handheld devices. Use it to quickly and conveniently find all the clinical information you need for over 2,700 medications—adult and peds dosing including off-label indications, interactions, pricing, packaging, adverse reactions divided into serious and common reactions, mechanism of action and much more. Also, take advantage of MultiCheck, a unique multiple drug interaction check feature that enables you to check interactions on up to 30 drugs at one time. Instantly access continually updated clinical data and medication safety DocAlert messages from the FDA by using the AutoUpdate feature.

MedRules

MedRules is an award-winning application featuring useful clinical prediction rules taken from the medical literature. Select a condition, input your parameters, and it will give you a clinical prediction of your recovery chances.

Cancer Staging and Treatment

The information contained in this program is obtained from Cancernet, National Cancer Institute, and the National Institute of Health. It contains information on over 90 types of cancer, including recent studies, general information, staging and also treatment options.

BloodPressMgr

This Blood Pressure Manager application keeps track of your blood pressure readings. The readings are highlighted with different colours, based on the pressure values. The program also shows the overall average statistics and the weekly distribution. All the pressure values can be plotted on several graphs with the ideal, borderline and hypertension lines. Using a Windows Desktop program you can print, plot additional graphs and export the readings data. You can also export the records of your readings to a comma-delimited file.

Each reading tracks the date, time, systolic and diastolic pressure, pulse and notes. Graph the overall, weekly, hourly and season statistics for systolic pressure, diastolic pressure and pulse.

Riley Kidometer

Riley Kidometer is a quick-reference tool for pediatric gender and age-based norms from infancy through 17 years.

Here are some of its features.

• Growth and nutrition: detailed information on growth including height velocity, daily caloric and protein requirements and age-specific recommendations for feeding infants and children
• Basic vitals: normal range for weight, height, head circumference, blood pressure, respiratory and heart rate and peak flow
• Development: skills that the child should have acquired (failure to learn new skills is often the first clue to some of the most severe diseases of childhood)
• Prevention: age-specific advice on keeping children healthy (information on injury/illness prevention, teaching parenting skills and other preventive health issues)
• Vaccine: age-appropriate vaccination recommendations

eDrugs Database

eDrugs Database contains over 12,500 drug names and dosage forms. It contains over 2,500 generic listings plus brand names and dosage forms. Each drug listing gives the generic name, brand name, usual dose, use or class and pregnancy risk, plus must-have additional information and notes relating to the drug’s usage. Many new investigational and orphan drugs have also been added to the database. The list is extensive and very much up to date. It includes drugs that are still investigational but likely to be FDA-approved in the near future.

Beiks Medical Dictionary Bundle

Everyone should have a Medical Dictionary, but it is particularly important for medical students and allied health professionals. The completely renewed and updated release of the Medical Dictionary bundle now includes over 38,000 definitions of terms and references in the modest size of 2.8 MB
memory.

In addition to the medical lexicons database itself, the package comes with the commercial (Pro) version of BDicty Dictionary Reader, a general purpose program for browsing reference content.

STAT Cardiac Risk

STAT Cardiac Risk estimates coronary heart disease risk using the Framingham Heart Study Prediction Scores (1998 update). Enter in age, sex, total cholesterol, HDL, blood pressure, smoking, and diabetes status and see the absolute risk of angina pectoris or MI over the course of 10 years. It helps communicate the total effect of multiple risk factors for heart disease.

The applications mentioned above can be downloaded from http://www.palmgear.com

Ashish Gupta is the founder and president of The Indian Palm User Group. He can be reached at ash@notcomguys.com