Trusted Health Articles to Your Phone or Computer: MedCircle

MedCircle is a new phone app and website that allows you access to curated, high-quality, accurate, health-related articles. What does this mean? It means that instead of Googling “bipolar” and getting back a zillion trashy results from sources you can’t trust (a pet peeve of mine), you can get articles on bipolar disorder from sources that have been reviewed by medical experts.

The Usefulness of MedCircle for Learning About Mental Health

I have, genuinely, found this new app to be helpful. MecCircle is actually bringing me information about health topics like bipolar disorder that I never knew before – and believe me, that isn’t an easy thing to do.

Recent mental illness-related headlines I have found interesting have included:

Bipolar Disorder Speeds Up Biological Aging (Medical News Today)
The Social Ties Between Autism and Schizophrenia (Scientific American)
Antidepressant Use During Pregnancy May Up Autism Risk (Newsweek)
When Kids Struggle with Addiction, ‘Recovery Schools’ Offer Needed Support (npr.org)

In addition to getting a news feed from quality news/health outlets, you can also follow health experts/institutions and see what they share and have to say as well. Healthcare providers that are in the system must be verified and reviewed by the MedCircle team to be listed. Search for specific topics is also available.

Setting Up MedCircle

Luckily, MedCircle is not one of those things that take an hour to set up. All you have to do is create an account, select health topics that interest you (many health topics are covered, not just mental health) as well as health experts/organizations, if you like, and start reading from a personalized feed.`

Once you create this feed, it’s available on your phone via app and on your computer.

And one of the nice things about MedCircle is whatever you choose is completely private. This is an issue as many people are uncomfortable with others knowing that they are looking for mental illness information.

Positives About MedCircle

MedCircle is great because of the breadth of available health topics. It’s useful because it makes it easy to learn new information. It’s also convenient because once on your phone, it sends push notifications when new information is available in your news feed. With my selected topics, this doesn’t happen every day, which is good so I’m not overwhelmed.

You can also mark things as a “favorite” which shows up in a separate section that you can view later. Comments are also available, although they are currently underused, likely due to the newness of the app. You can share content via things like email, Facebook, Skype and other means.

Negatives About MedCircle

While I really do like this app, it’s not perfect. One of the major oversights seems to be a way to open an article in a browser or get its URL from the app. You can do this from MedCircle’s website interface but not from within the app.

I’ve also found that sometimes clicking read more of an article doesn’t render the rest of the article. This may be because the content is paid, I don’t know, but it’s frustrating. This is rare, though.