Like many free PHRs already online, MyHealthMyWorld.com’s will allow you to build a personal health record for yourself and family members. It will allow you to list all medications, all treatments, all diseases and diagnoses from birth to present. Everything you or someone who is caring for you would want to know and have handy in one place.

Yet MyHealthMyWorld.com’s PHR will offer users something extra. Many of us, myself included, take non-prescription supplements of one form or another. Vitamins. Herbal formulas. Compounds and mixtures. In other words, things not prescribed by your physician or necessarily purchased over the counter at your local pharmacy.

For example, currently I take vitamin E, calcium, Omega 3 fish oil, and half an iron tablet every five days, plus some other supplements. A friend I know drinks protein shakes every day to help him bulk up. Another friend swears by the black cohosh she’s taking to help combat menopause-related night sweats.

I’m building my own PHR at ihealthrecord.com and while there’s a space on the medications page to list "other" – which I suppose I could use to list my supplements – there’s no section of the record that specifically asks me to list my supplement regimen. I don’t think of my vitamins and supplements as part of my health record – our health care culture in this country never trained us to do so. So unless I was specifically asked to list my supplements, I probably wouldn’t.

In fact, I didn’t. Two weeks ago when I filled out the "list your medications" page of my ihealthrecord.com PHR, I didn’t think to list my vitamin E or fish oil capsules or any other supplement in the "other" section. After all, they aren’t "medications" in the way I’ve been raised to think of medications. It wasn’t until Geoff Purdom, Ph.D., of MyHealthMyWorld asked me to check did I even think about them.

I imagine most people wouldn’t either. Which is why being able to certainly would be a good idea.