The Informed Diabetic: Applying doctors' research tools to better understand your condition and treatment options

INTRODUCTION

By reading this book, you'll learn how to find reliable medical research using the specialty websites, databases, and search engines that the most up-to-date doctors use. This knowledge will empower you to take an active role in your healthcare, making it a team effort between you and your doctor.

No matter how much we trust our doctor, sometimes we want to do our own research on our condition. But it’s hard —the internet is filled with misinformation, and even medical professionals can find it challenging to stay updated with the numerous breakthroughs being published regularly.

The Problem

The internet is full of unreliable medical information.

Many medical journals are publishing research that is not trustworthy.

Hyped breakthrough claims waste patients’ and doctors’ time.

The Solution

Check your treatment follows the most recent medical specialist society guidelines.

Use the medical reviews that doctors use to check the professional consensus on the latest research.

Learn which are the best medical articles from the best journals.

Focus on new research likely to benefit patients now or within the next few years.

Diplomatically discuss your findings with your doctor.

After reading this book you will be able to:

Identify sources of the most reliable medical research.

Stop wasting time on breakthrough research.

Access the same guidelines that expert doctors use globally.

Avoid low value care that wastes your time and money and may actually be harmful.

Take an active role in your healthcare, making it a team effort between you and your doctor.

What is the Medical Research Literature

Before we can describe the good and the bad of the medical research literature, we need to define what it is. When we talk about medical research literature, we're referring to a huge collection of written works. These works are all about health and medicine. They come from many different sources like medical journals, research studies, and medical conferences. This information gets published and shared so that doctors, nurses, scientists, and other healthcare professionals can learn from it and use it to provide the best care possible.

People with a university education will know there is a hierarchy of research literature. In Chapter 4 we take a deep dive into the hierarchy from an evidence-based medicine approach, but here we provide a basic outline with an everyday example.

Let’s use carpentry to explore 5 levels of increasing hierarchy and reliability in the recommendations provided by a carpenter.

Informed opinion

Let’s imagine Fred, a qualified carpenter writes a paper that provides their opinion on the best way to install flashing around a window to stop it from leaking, this is an informed opinion based on education and experience. But keep in mind, not all experiences or educational backgrounds are the same. Fred will only have seen a small percent of all the windows installed in a town.

Small research studies

Next, suppose Fred decides to systematically record the