Lesson 6 Gale Virtual Reference

I started out searching the Gale Encyclopedia of Cancer because my husband has a very rare form of cancer so I like to search out information on his type. I found that there are only one to two cases of neuroendocrine pancreatic tumors for every 100,000 people. The average age of diagnosis is 53 years of age and he was diagnosed at age 56. It talked about the shot he gets each month (Sandostatin) and through the references I found out how nutrition can help with the symptoms.

I used the search feature to see if there were any other articles on neuroendocrine tumors or carcinoid tumors in the Gale library. There were a couple more that I looked at to see what more information I could glean. Then I tried out the "listen" feature. It wasn't bad, but it would take some getting used to listening to the computer voice. What a great reference this was for me. The article was easy to read and understand. The encyclopedia was 2010. I don't know when they put out an updated version, but I think it would be great to get the newest information because cancer research is changing all the time.

I then used the search at the top of the page to look up the Mediterranean Diet and found an article called the Anti-Cancer Diet which has a lot of the principles of the Mediterranean diet. Since the Anti- cancer diet talked about the Mediterranean diet my next article was on this diet. I learned it isn't really a diet as it is a way of life. How many times you should eat red meats per month, what you should eat weekly and what you should eat daily.

I checked out Tolliver's Tablet and found she learned about the highlighting of words and sentences in the listen feature so I went back and utilized it on a paragraph in one of the articles I was researching. It is a nice feature. I also checked out Karen's Blog and found she looked up the Encyclopedia of Cancer too.