Understanding Medical Literature
The best guidance on your disease and how to manage your disease comes from your
doctors and their staff. While there are a number of sources of medical literature
available, before you make any medical decisions, you should talk to the medical
professionals involved in your care to ensure that you understand the information
you are reading and help decide what it may or may not mean for you.
It may be helpful to print out the information and articles from your search, and
bring them along to your medical appointments. You should understand that medical
literature often contains complex medical and scientific information that can be
misunderstood or be very difficult to understand. Different sources of medical information
are also subjected to different levels of review and analysis, making some articles
more highly regarded (such as peer reviewed literature) than others. We suggest
that you discuss the information that you find with your doctors, before making
any medical decisions.
Medical literature often contains a vast amount of information that may reflect
different points in overall medical knowledge (depending on the date of the publication),
may contain information about unproven therapies or medical approaches, and may
contain scientific or medical opinions intended to generate discussion among trained
medical professionals. Getting help from your medical team in understanding this
information is very important.
Searching PubMed literature
One way of finding out more about rare diseases is to monitor medical literature
– including searching a medical resource like PubMed. PubMed contains access to
extensive medical literature on an extensive range of topics. The medical literature
found on PubMed is primarily written for the medical or research community and is
typically very complex for patients and consumers. You can search the medical literature
online at the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Web site at www.pubmed.gov.
PubMed includes more than 18 million citations from life science journals for biomedical
articles dating back to 1948. 1 Using PubMed, you can obtain abbreviated
versions (abstracts) of published articles from these journals. In some cases, entire
articles are available for free.
For a tutorial on the basics of using PubMed, including building your search, managing
the results, and obtaining the articles, you can visit http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/disted/pubmedtutorial/index.html.
When you leave BraveCommunity.com for PubMed, you are accessing information for
which Shire HGT is not responsible, and for which this site's policies do not apply.
Reference
- PubMed Web site. Home page.
www.pubmed.gov. Accessed March 31, 2009.