MedCalc review

Mark Mackay

We review MedCalc, myriad medical workings out bundled into a single iPhone app

Published on Sep 15, 2009

When it comes to the health and maintenance of the human body, there are all kinds of numbers involved in the process. Measuring how well-kept that most wonderful of instruments is can be a complicated process.

You can look at body mass index, heart rate, blood pressure, cholesterol count and many more factors to get an idea of how your body is ticking over. Maths is far from everyone's best subject. The same can be said for biology and medicine and, being a bunch of journalists, none of these subjects are our specialties.

Fortunately, MedCalc is at hand to help fill the gaps in our biological knowledge and possibly highlight a few more previously-unseen ones along the way. When you first fire up an iPhone application and get a message telling you that it's 'no substitute for clinical reasoning' you know you're in for a hell of a ride.

MedCalc is basically a series of simple formula-based spread sheets that provides various fields into which you can enter numbers such as heart rate and blood pressure. Using this data, MedCalc will then calculate factors such as cardiac output. In all honesty, many of the features in the app flew way above our heads.

This is not an app for the everyday office worker looking for a little light entertainment, or even a handy app for executing probable diagnoses on people if something goes wrong. There's a considerable number of formulae in the app for just about every medical measurement you could think of - and many that you couldn't.A basic example would be body mass index, whereby you can enter someone's height and weight and MedCalc will work out their BMI, which is a simple matter of kilograms per meter squared. The different formulae are organised into categories such as anesthesiology, cardiology and diabetes.

Recently used formulae are saved into their own category for easy access if you're in the habit of using them regularly. In short, MedCalc is not an iPhone app made for mass appeal. It's not made for fun and it's certainly not entertaining. This is a tool for the medical professional, to help them work out numbers used in the diagnosis of a specific symptoms, and that's a job it does very well.

If you are a medical professional and in the habit of saving peoples lives or saving them from ailments then it would definitely be worth a download. It's free and it may just help you out of a potentially tricky situation.