Medline Search

Many web sites and 'service providors' who target medical practitioners give 'free access' to medline to get your to sign up with them. But how many tell you that Medline is FREE on the net anyhow directly from the National Library of Medicine in the USA. Lets follow this link to the National Institute of Health and look for their PubMed service.

Whilst PubMed may look simple I recently finished my MD thesis on a highly technical ICU subject and my whole referencing system was based on PubMed. As a class exercise lets look at a case scenario and see what we find:

"Mrs. Bloggs, 56 year old lady for a D&C for menorrhagia. Haemoglobin 11g/dl but otherwise a fit and healthy lady weighing 60Kg with no predisposing factors towards difficult intubation. She tells you that she is terrified of anaesthetics because her father died from one in the early 1970's due to a severe pyrexia in the first few hours post op."

You suspect Malignant Hyperpyrexia. Using PubMed we are going to try and find out some background about this before we phone our colleagues in the city.

[case1q.htm]

When you find something interesting post a summary of it to our tutorial email discussion group tutorial@palmer.net.au so that we can all share what you find.

Learning Ponits:

	Medline will give you a lot of detailed information but this is often TOO detailed.
	You sometimes need more than just the abstracts and it takes a lot of time to wade through all of the pure science articles.

In the next exercise we will use the same case scenario but search the whole web itself instead of just the medline database.

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