Medical Research Tips from a Legal Nurse Consultant
Medical research is often helpful, if not critical, for your cases. But for the uninitiated, it can be like trying to find a needle in a haystack of websites. How do you find what your looking for, and avoid hits from mysickpet.com and the like?
I'm going to share with you a few of my favorite free medical websites, along with some tips to make them more useful. First, though, a few caveats. 1) An experienced legal nurse consultant is very efficient at medical research and will save you time and effort. Even though you may find a good article, it often takes someone with medical knowledge to understand how it may relate to the issues in your case. 2) In the medical world, there are often several different ways to say the same thing or something similar. One ramification of this, is that you can easily miss the articles you're looking for. 3) When you do find a what you think is a good article, there may be an even better one in the article's references.
PubMed
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed
This is the motherload for medical research and one of the best things the government has ever done with your money. Pubmed is a great user-friendly site wherein you can easily search through millions of abstracts and citations from thousands of medical journals, with occasional links to full articles. I use this so often, that I've got a tab for it in my browser right next to Google. If you're going to use it a lot, you might check out their "Quick Start Guide," but the following are a few quick tips to help you.
You can do Boolean searches to focus or expand your search. Type "AND" (capital letters, without the quotations of course) between your keywords, to get find abstracts that contain all those words. Use quotations (" . . . ") for exact phrases. For keywords in a title, type [TI] after the keyword. To include variations of a keyword, type an asterisk (*) immediately at the end of it. If you'd like similar articles to the one you just pulled up, click on 'Related Citations'.
Now if we could just get FDA.gov to be as user-friendly . . .
American Family Physician
http://www.aafp.org/online/en/home/publications/journals/afp.html
I like this site a lot because you can get full articles from their journal on numerous subjects. Furthermore, the writing is fairly easy to understand for an educated layperson and give a good overview on the various subjects. That said, the information found here is somewhat general in nature, and more issue-specific articles from other sources may be needed for medicolegal cases.
Medscape / eMedicine
http://www.medscape.com
Although not quite as user-friendly as it used to be, Medscape is still a great place to find free, authoritative, in-depth articles on a vast multitude of subjects. To access articles directly from the site, you have to register. But registration is free and the site can thereafter automatically log you in, if you use the same computer and browser. If for some reason you don't want to register, you can find some of their articles with a Google search, if you add "emedicine' to your keywords.
Another kink here, is that when you do access an article, you usually have to click through page after page of sections. One trick to getting around this: There is a 'Print' link at the top right of the first page. You can choose to print the entire article. Then instead of actually printing, do a 'print to PDF' and save it on your computer.
Also of note, Medscape also offers some pretty nifty mobile apps, many of which are free.
American Heart Association Journals
http://www.ahajournals.org
There are several medical journals you can access here, mainly pertaining to the heart (of course). For my purposes, I use Circulation more than the others. You can do an advanced search limited to one journal or across several of them.
Google
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en
"Google?!," you ask. "But now we're back to the needle in a haystack!" Well, not so much if you use some of my tips. Firstly, the link I provided above is for the advanced search, which can help narrow your search considerably. Furthermore, if you need even more focus than what the advanced search offers, you can add Boolean search terms: put a minus (-) immediately in front of a keyword to exclude it; type "OR" between similar keywords; use quotations for more phrases. Looking for a particular article? Type the exact title of the article in the exact phrase section (or use quotes). This is also helpful to find similar articles, as it will also pull up articles where it is listed in the references. Another key tip: Whenever possible use the medical term, instead of the layman's term. For example, instead of "gallbladder surgery," use "cholecystectomy." That way you might avoid superfred421's forum post about his recent surgery. There is also a Google 'Scholar' search that will just search only through professional literature - just click on the 'More' tab at the top of the page and select Scholar.
Although these are but a few of the websites I use when doing medical research for attorneys, they are some of the best. I hope you found this information helpful.