Guide to Clinical Preventive Services

The Guide to Clinical Preventive Services was produced by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, and includes guidelines and recommendations for preventive measures. If you need to know who to screen, at what age, for what disorder, this is the site for you.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) was convened by the Public Health Service to rigorously evaluate clinical research in order to assess the merits of preventive measures, including screening tests, counseling, immunizations, and preventive medications. USPSTF also provides pocket guides, email alerts and downloads for your mobil device.

Family Medicine Digital Resources Library

The Family Medicine Digital Resources Library contains user-posted conference presentations and handouts, and shared curricular materials such as PowerPoint lectures, learning modules, syllabi, digital images, video and audio recordings, recommended Web sites and more.

A service of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine, there are expertly peer-reviewed materials on just about any topic having to do with family medicine.

Searching the Literature Part 3: Synopses

Synopses are help you get answers fast. As Haynes says, "The perfect synopsis would provide exactly enough information to support a clinical action. . .for example 'Review: antibiotics do not lead to general improvement in upper respiratory tract infections.'" Any resource that provides an abstract of a single study, that answers a single clinical questions qualifies as a Synopses. Usually, though, questions are more complicated and require discussion of multiple studies, which I will discuss under Summaries.

ACP Journal Club, Essential Evidence Plus(formerly known as InfoPoems), and Bandolier may be sources of synopses that you have heard of, as well as PURL's from the Journal of Family Practice, and Clinical Queries in PubMed.

Related Post:
PURL's: Synopses from Journal of Family Practice
PubMed Quick Tip #3: Clinical Queries.

Related Posts:
Searching the Literature Part 1: Studies
Searching the Literature Part 2: Syntheses
Searching the Literature Part 4: Summaries

Critically Appraised Topics(CATS): Questions for Journal Club

A useful tool for journal club, the Duke University Medical Library offers Word Templates for critically appraising topics. It takes you step by step through therapy, diagnosis, prognosis, harm, and systematic review.

Searching the Literature Part 2: Syntheses

In Part 1, I looked at the base of the literature Pyramid, the original Studies. The next level is Syntheses According to Haynes(2001), Syntheses are based on:

*Rigorous searches for evidence

*Explicit scientific reviews of the studies uncovered in the search

*Systematic assembly of the evidence to provide as clear a signal about the effects of a healthcare intervention as the evidence will allow.

Syntheses are more rapidly useable than the entire universe of Studies. Systematic Reviews are a particularly useful type of Synthesis, which set out to answer a single clinical questions.

• The Trip Database, is a filter for searching for Evidence Based Medicine(EBM), which conveniently breaks search results into categories, including Systematic Reviews.


• The Cochrane Collaboration is the most well known publisher of Systematic Reviews, a non-profit group that reviews evidence, based in England. Their website includes abstracts of reviews and plain language summaries.
  


• You can also search for the abstracts in PubMed, in the Clinical Queries section, under the Finding Systematic Reviews.

Related Posts:

Searching the Literature Part 1: Studies

Searching the Literature Part 3: Synopses

Searching the Literature Part 4: Summaries

Board Review Questions

This kitty from ragesoss has an interesting method of studying for the Boards!

Most of the resources on the web for study questions are fee-based, but there are questions at the site for

Resident & Staff Physician.

The Journal, Hospital Physician also has an archive of self-assessment questions.

The Library has Mayo Clinic Internal Medicine Review 2006-2007(WB 18.2 M473), and Swanson's Family Practice Review 2005(WB 18.2 S972).

Look for them in the WB section of the book shelves.

Searching the Literature Part 1: Studies

The "5S" levels of organisation of evidence from healthcare research.
(From Haynes, 2006)

I tend to focus on the bottom of the Pyramid with Studies, the foundation of everything else. I search PubMed, the National Library of Medicine(NLM) database of abstracts from 3900 journals. Sometimes your Attending will want you to read a "classic" study, with an unintelligible acronym. such as TROPHY, STAR, or HOPE, from the base of the Pyramid. I'm glad to help you track these down.

I like to see where info originates, in a librarian-geeky kind of way--an Attending might want this kind of foundational backstory at times, or at other times you need something efficient and relevant to everyday patient care.

A more manageable approach to searching PubMed for Clinical questions, is the Clinical Queries link(under Tools), which leads to a filter for Evidence-Based Studies, as well as Systematic Reviews within PubMed, incorporating the next layer of the Pyramid, Syntheses. More on this next time.

Related Posts:
Searching the Literature Part 2: Syntheses
Searching the Literature Part 3: Synopses
Searching the Literature Part 4: Summaries

Medical Spanish with Audio

Check out Practicing Spanish, for medical professionals. The author is a Spanish teacher living in the U.S. who has also trained as a medical interpretor.

The audio has dialogues between patients and health care providers as well as pronunciation guides, phrases, and anatomy. If you learn best by listening, this site will be very helpful.

Note: Scroll down after choosing a link on this site--for some reason there is a lot of blank space before the info appears.

Related Post:
MedicalSpanish.com