The vast majority of medical studies have been devoted to new drugs and procedures. If you DON’T find evidence about how a wellness therapy impacts a particular health issue, it does NOT mean that therapy is proven NOT to be effective – it means the evidence doesn’t exist. Studies completed – whether the evidence is for or against – are searchable under wellness modalities.
These databases are clinical tools used by medical professionals, and you will inevitably face some confusing medical-ese. Don’t be intimidated, just jump in. (And ask a medical professional to help you decode the research.)
The Databases
PubMed: A service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine, PubMed was released in 1996 as a free digital archive of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. PubMed comprises 20-million-plus citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals and online books from around the world. Some 11.5 million articles are listed with their abstract and 3.1 million articles are available in full-text for free.
The Cochrane Library:Â British epidemiologist Archie Cochrane is regarded as the originator of the Evidence-Based Medicine concept (in the 1950s). And the Cochrane Library is a collection of very high-quality medical databases, which have, at their core, the Cochrane Reviews, systematic reviews and meta-analyses which summarize and interpret the results of well-conducted, randomised controlled trials – the “gold standard” in Evidence-Based Medicine. The Cochrane Library is a subscription-based database but offers free access to abstracts.
TRIP: The TRIP Database, launched in 1997, is a search engine designed to allow clinicians to quickly find answers to their medical questions using the best available evidence. Trip’s founders realized medical professionals were being forced to perform time-consuming searches at multiple websites to get at the most relevant information. So, they designed TRIP as a meta-search engine, allowing users to both simultaneously search thousands of databases, medical publications and resources, as well as easily filter the results: limiting searches to the most stringent, highest-quality medical evidence or expanding them to include results like patient information, news articles, etc.
