Consumer Health Complete

 

What is Consumer Health Complete, and how can it benefit you? Consumer Health Complete is a database that gives you access to hundreds of full-text journals, health reports, medical images and diagrams, magazines, consumer health pamphlets from the CDC, FDA, and others, animations with audio descriptions and transcripts, a medical dictionary, plus so much more. Perhaps the best part is that it is designed with the average consumer in mind, with health and wellness information specifically geared to help users gain a better overall understanding of key medical and health-related topics. Whether you are a mom trying to get fact-based information on bipolar disorder for her child, or a student writing a paper on concussions in sports, Consumer Health Complete will help you get valuable information that is vetted and reliant on facts, rather than trusting the information found from a quick Google search.

To access Consumer Health Complete, you will first need to visit our CMRLS website at https://cmrls.lib.ms.us/. Once there, hover over Digital Library and look down to see Virtual Reference Collection. You will then see Consumer Health Complete, the second option down the list. See the screenshot below for visual directions.

Let’s explore a bit of what the user experience on Consumer Health Complete looks like. For our example, we will be looking for information on concussions to write a research paper.

To start, find the search bar at the top of the screen. You can search there, or you can do an advanced search by clicking “Advanced Search” to the right.

Alternatively, Consumer Health Complete has grouped topics together under the “Explore Topics” section, which can be found by scrolling down on the main home page. This is an easy and direct way to find your necessary information.

For example, to find information on concussions, select the “Food, Nutrition and Exercise” box, and you will then see a box for concussions on the next page. Once that box has been selected, the page pictured below will pull up.

 

          

    On this page, basic information such as definitions and topic overviews can be found. The “Concussions in Pro Sports: Overview” article already looks promising, but it does not say peer reviewed. Using peer reviewed articles is important for maintaining academic integrity in your sources. Select “Peer Reviewed” from underneath the search bar and then click the search icon again. Now, you will find the peer reviewed journal articles that will be best suited as sources for an academic research paper. You can navigate between the types of sources you want by selecting from the options circled in the image below.

Now that you have found good sources that you wish to use for your paper, there is another important step that Consumer Health Complete can help you with, and that is citations.

            Once you have clicked on an article that you wish to use, you can select the quotation marks on the top right. (This is also where you can download your article, share it, save it, and more.) This tool will automatically generate the proper citation for you, as shown below.

    You also have the option to change your citation style, which depends on what discipline you are writing in. This makes building an annotated bibliography a breeze.

             These are just a few of the many things that Consumer Health can do. How you utilize the database depends on what exactly you need from it, but it is still a very helpful tool, regardless of whether it is being used in the realm of academia or in a more household health sense. In conclusion, Consumer Health Complete was created for you, the consumer, and it is a wonderful, free resource to help provide easy access to important health and wellness information. If you have any questions about using this database, do not hesitate to reach out to your librarian for assistance.