By definition, "crisis" means that one's life is out of control.
When faced with a health crisis, many people experience the
information they receive about their condition -- and the way
they receive it -- as making their feelings of being out of
control worse, not better. Recently, a team at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison reported encouraging results in addressing
this problem with a new computer-based program, the
Comprehensive Health Enhancement Support System (CHESS). An
interactive, PC-based system with color graphics and a user-
friendly format, CHESS is easy to use — even for people with no
computer experience. Patients diagnosed with serious conditions
such as breast cancer or AIDS/HIV infection are given a computer
at home. At their own convenience, patients can access timely,
comprehensible information about their disease and take
advantage of a variety of non-threatening and anonymous support
opportunities. They can read brief answers to hundreds of
commonly asked questions, detailed articles a