Monday, July 7, 2008

Links to Research

Here are some sites I recommend when researching medical evidence:

1) the U.S. national institute of mental health; their research is funded by the U.S. government:

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/

2) PubMed: this is a medical research database, with access to abstracts, sometimes to the full texts, of research papers. I invite you to go look at the research yourself, directly. I do think it is important to develop a critical eye, though, for the signs of strong vs. weak research evidence (e.g. size of study, randomization, length of follow-up, source of funding, etc.). If you have read a newspaper headline about a research finding, I think it is usually important to go to the primary source, and have a look at the findings yourself. Sometimes the media presentation of the research findings is misleading or incomplete.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/

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