Using PubMed to find out more about PD Research

This post was updated at: http://parkiesupport.blogspot.com/2019/12/using-new-pubmed.html since there is a newer version of PubMed.

If you are curious about a particular topic, the US government maintains a free database of medical research articles, called PubMed.  

You can search on a topic and it will give you basic information about published medical research papers (title of the paper, journal it was published in, date published, author names), with the most recent articles first.  You want to narrow your topic, because a search just on “parkinson’s disease” yields more than 95,000 articles.  If you narrow the topic to something like “parkinson’s disease industrial exposure” the numbers are much less, and you can quickly look through the titles to see if you want to read about any studies.

If you click on the article title, it’s linked to the abstract, a short description of the work and results.  

From the abstract, there is sometimes a link to the full paper.  Sometimes the full paper is free, but many times it’s not.  

You can email the abstract to yourself, and can email the list of papers, called a summary, to yourself.

Some articles are in PubMed right at the publication date, whereas others are not.  If you'd heard about the research, but it's not in PubMed yet, try Googling the journal, which may have the abstract available from their website.

The terminology can be dense, but the articles can be interesting.  Definitely useful for answering the question, “What does the research say?”   Helpful also when somebody is sure they know that something is a sure “cure.”