How Doctors Know Everything: How To Answer Any Medical Question With Pubmed

Most people come up with really good questions to ask their medical doctors only after they have left the doctor’s office. Do any of the following medical questions seem familiar to you?

Middle-aged man:
Is ginseng effective in treating my symptoms of type II diabetes (anti-hyperglycemic effect)?
Man with advance right testicular cancer:
Does chemotherapy (BEP protocol) lead to complete male infertility?
African-American woman:
I have a history of asthma. I also have a child that was prematurely born. Is it safe to put vitamin supplements in the baby formula of my three-month old infant?
Menopausal woman:
Are phytoestrogens (isoflavones from plant extracts) effective in reducing postmenopausal symptoms of hot flashes?
26 year-old woman with melanoma (skin cancer):
Does chemotherapy (Dacarbazine and Interleukin-2) lead to female infertility?

Doctors generally do not have answers to these questions off the top of their heads. What they can do is to find out the answer for you overnight. And if they did have a straight answer, that probably means that they’ve looked into the topic before. I can almost guarantee you that the first (and probably last) place that ANY medical doctor goes to look for answers is PubMed (www.pubmed.gov):

What is PubMed? PubMed is a freely available tool from the National Library of Medicine of the United States of America. PubMed includes only peer-reviewed journals. This renders PubMed several folds more reliable than newspapers, which are often interpretation of this data. With a current citation volume of over 15 million articles, PubMed is clearly the first-choice tool of all professional caregivers.

Anyone can use PubMed. However, the inexperienced or novice user who wishes to find the answer to a particular problem will quickly become frustrated with the hundreds, if not thousands of search results generated by an inappropriate search method, which is why you need this e-book.

In this book, I’d like to show you how to do a proper search to generate tens, or fewer, results rather than a few hundreds, or thousands, of results. More importantly, I’d like to show you how to properly interpret the results in a meaningful way.

More often than not, inappropriate use of anything will likely cause more harm than benefit. In this book, I’d like to show you the PROPER way of answering questions that a medical doctor should follow. This book is written not only for the general public, but it is also written for the healthcare giver, who has some doubts about how to effectively use PubMed.

If you have some time, I’d like to show you how to use PubMed. It is the only medical “answer book” by which all practicing physicians abide.