How to filter only structured abstract in Pubmed?

It is as simple as typing the word “hasstructuredabstract” in the research box of Pubmed, followed by the search terms you are intending to use for implementing your bibliography.

20 million PubMed papers can’t be wrong (Photo credit: dullhunk)

Thus all the references you will retrieve will be automatically associated with a structured abstract shaped with the useful usual labelled sections (eg: introduction, method results and conclusion). The references without such a structured summary will be eliminated from your research.

This word hasstructuredabstract makes me think of the word abracadabra another magical word

More content here:
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/policy/structured_abstracts.html

http://www.infodocket.com/2012/08/01/new-search-syntax-structured-abstracts-now-searchable-in-pubmed/

Related articles

• New Search Syntax: Structured Abstracts Now Searchable in PubMed (infodocket.com)

A scientific speech addressed to medical journalists

When Gary Schwitzer talks at a health care journalists congress the result is the below brilliant course of medical research methodology.

AHCJ 2012 Atlanta conf. talk

View more PowerPoint from Gary Schwitzer

The way health care journalists report the lowering of risk linked to a medical or pharmaceutical intervention has an impact on the size of the interest the public will give to the so-called innovative therapy. The example chosen by Gary with Nolvadex and breast cancer risk is very striking (see slide 36).

Thank you Gary Schwitzer for this very informative lecture which benefits not only to journalists but also to health care consumers (i.e. all of us).

Related articles

• Well: How Doctors and Patients Do Harm (well.blogs.nytimes.com)

Medicine is a religion

And here are its tables of law

Ten Commandments

Image via Wikipedia

• Thou shalt treat according to level of risk rather than level of risk factor.
• Thou shalt exercise caution when adding drugs to existing polypharmacy.
• Thou shalt consider benefits of drugs as proven only by hard endpoint studies.
• Thou shalt not bow down to surrogate endpoints, for these are but graven images.
• Thou shalt not worship Treatment Targets, for these are but the creations of Committees.
• Thou shalt apply a pinch of salt to Relative Risk Reductions, regardless of P values, for the population of their provenance may bear little relationship to thy daily clientele.
• Thou shalt honour the Numbers Needed to Treat, for therein rest the clues to patient-relevant information and to treatment costs.
• Thou shalt not see detailmen, nor covet an Educational Symposium in a luxury setting.
• Thou shalt share decisions on treatment options with the patient in the light of estimates of the individual’s likely risks and benefits.
• Honour the elderly patient, for although this is where the greatest levels of risk reside, so do the greatest hazards of many treatments.

Amen.

Time for a little of that religion.

The list was published on Richard Lehman’s blog but it was written by John Yudkin.

We fully acknowledge and thank Gary Schwitzer’s health news watch dog , the Carlat Psychiatry Blog and the BMJ blogger Richard Lehman who led us to these sound and wise tables of law full of awareness.
These ten commandments stem from the wisdom of practitioners all along the years. My preferred one is the tenth: “Honour the elderly patient, for although this is where the greatest levels of risk reside, so do the greatest hazards of many treatments.”
Because of my Confucians way of thinking?
And you, which is your preferred one?

If you want to read more:

http://www.healthnewsreview.org/2012/01/ten-commandments-of-the-new-therapeutics/

http://carlatpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2012/01/bmjs-ten-commandments-for-ideal.html

http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2012/01/03/richard-lehmans-journal-review-3-january-2012/

Related articles

• Get Your Doctor to Treat You Right: A Translation of “The Ten Commandments of the New Therapeutics” (psychologytoday.com)

backache

A Christmas Sciatica

Image via Wikipedia

During the night of December 24th I incurred a terrific backache which made me to experience the efficacy of the emergencies services in Marseilles. The pain was so intense that I asked my wife to dial the 15 (emergency phone number across all the France’s territory). They sent me (at five o clock in the morning of December 25^th, Christmas day) a Doctor who injected me Bi-prophenid and Myolastan). After his departure, the pain increasing higher and higher and my left leg becoming insensitive I took myself the phone, dialled the 15 and asked to the physician regulator to send me an ambulance to transport me to the emergency room on the basis of neurological symptoms.  A crew of firemen of Marseilles arrived in about 10 minutes of time and transported me in a chair down my apartment (I was totally unable to walk) in to their fire department vehicle and to the neuro surgical emergency of the Timone university hospital.  I had in emergency an MRI (very sophisticated magnetic imagery, better than scanner). I was examined by an intern in neurosurgery. Pain was released by perfusion of analgesics and anti-inflammatory drugs (thanks to Big Pharma) during the day and the following night and no longer than the next day I was examined in my public hospital bed by the Professor Fuentes a Key Opinion Leader in Neuro surgery who diagnosed a 3/6 paresis of my left foot but no need of surgical intervention if no aggravation occurs in the following 24 hours.  I discharged from the hospital December 27^th and was bring back home by a light sanitary vehicle. My sentiment after this event is: yes we have the best health care system in the world, but also the best health insurance system in the world (I had absolutely nor bill neither fee to pay). And I’m proud of it. Perhaps France is indebted but if it is for such results in term of care (same thing in term of child’s education or public transports), the money we have borrowed was not spend in vain. For now on I am on work loss with income compensation benefits.  I still have difficulties to stand up or to sit down for long periods or to walk for a distance. If my employer read this post I want him to know that I wrote it lying in my sofa with my laptop computer;-)

Related articles

• You: Patients With Sore Backs Find Minimal Surgery Is Not A Pain – NY1 (brooklyn.ny1.com)
• 6 Back Pain Remedies (foxnews.com)
• What is Back Pain? (greenzblog.com)
• US study certifies yoga does ease backache (news.bioscholar.com)

Bad science

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A greek is struggling against bad science in medical field.

This bio statistician, named Georgia Salanti, has undertaken a mathematical critical appraisal of medical studies published in scholarly journals.

An other scientist named Ioannidis  selected 45 high impact articles which have demonstrated a significant effect of the intervention or the care they had  studied.

He found that 41 percent of these articles he analysed where mathematically wrong in their statements of a significant effect. The full text of the study is readable here.

Related articles

• Bad Science (justwritewhite.wordpress.com)
• What is a Peer-Reviewed Journal? (drdianehamilton.wordpress.com)
• Medical studies gloss over side-effects: Canadian researcher (canada.com)