What are your patients reading or watching?

Health News Review reviews news stories that make a therapeutic claim about:• Specific treatments• Procedures• Investigational drugs or devices• Vitamins or nutritional supplements• Diagnostic and screening tests A multi-disciplinary team of reviewers from journalism, medicine, health services research and public health assesses the quality of the stories using a standardized rating systerm. Stories are graded and critiques are published on this website.

If your patient asks you about something they heard on the news this site is helpful for evaluating the credibility of the claims.

Information Overload

I have been giving links to different sources of information, and that can be a good thing(as a librarian I tend to think this!), but there is also the challenge of information overload.

The ability to find relevant, accurate, helpful information to answer clinical questions is a skill that can be learned, but it's not all about looking at more and more sites.

Ask yourself:

• Which sites are easier for me to navigate? Medline comes in many interfaces from PubMed to Ebsco Medline, plus many others.
• Have I looked at the sources that are respected by others in my field, or who are experts in their field? Medical Associations often issue guidelines based on extensive research and discussion.
• Am I avoiding looking things up because I don't know where to start and feel overwhelmed? If you work backwards, starting with a guideline from a site like Guideline.gov, or a chapter from Uptodate, you can see where the writers got their information in their list of references.

Remember that I am available for questions you might have, which is another way to deal with information overload.

BMC Family Practice Journal

BMC Family Practice is an open access journal publishing original peer-reviewed research articles in all aspects of primary health care, including clinical management of patients, professional training, shared decision making, and the organisation and evaluation of health care in the community.

How do I find an article? Part 2: PMID number

The PMID number is a unique identifier for medical articles. While it's nice to have authors, title, page numbers etc., the PMID is a quick and easy way to capture that information. You'll find the PMID number at the end of each reference in PubMed. It also pops up in Uptodate--they provide a list of articles the author consulted for whatever section you are reading. So for example:

1. If you want to read one of these original articles, go to the references at the end of the section.
   
2. Click on the one you are interested in.


3. Look at the bottom of the page for the PMID number.


4. The PMID number is a unique identifier for articles in Medline, and if you type it into the search box, either you will get the full text article(yay!!) or need to provide a credit card number to the publisher for "pay per view."