A love letter to PubMed

Hi,

If you’re into nutrition or ever tried to research health online, you’ve probably encountered the beast that is PubMed. But I bet there are some things about PubMed you weren’t aware of. For example, did you know that …

… PubMed launched in 1997, with Al Gore performing the “ribbon cutting” on live television by searching for Achilles tendon rupture treatments?

… One of Examine’s medical reviewers is a physician who was the original designer and principal developer of PubMed?

… PubMed contains more than 37 million citations and abstracts of biomedical literature?

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Love is a many-splendored thing

PubMed is awesome and fully worthy of your love whether you’re a researcher, academic, or layperson. Case in point:

Have you seen the early 1990s movie called Lorenzo’s Oil? It’s a true story about fatty acids (yes, really!) starring Susan Sarandon and Nick Nolte.

Their child, Lorenzo, has a rare genetic condition called adrenoleukodystrophy. He’s a normal and energetic kid until a bunch of brain-related symptoms hit. His parents learn that Lorenzo will die within two years, due to long-chain fatty acids building up throughout his body in an uncontrolled fashion.

His parents, despite not being scientists, hit the books and eventually spearhead a potential treatment made up of oils with specific fatty acids. While Lorenzo ended up living well past the movie release date, outliving predictions by a couple decades, the efficacy of Lorenzo’s oil has shown mixed results in subsequent trials.

Still … mixed results for a fatal disease without other treatments, due to intense research conducted by non-scientist parents trying to save their little boy? Two thumbs up! (That was Roger Ebert’s rating too.)

The real life events facing Lorenzo and his parents began in 1984. PubMed went live in 1997 (which, coincidentally, is also the year that Skynet went live). How much easier would it have been for Lorenzo’s parents to research fatty acids with the internet and PubMed? How many research breakthroughs since then have started with exploratory PubMed searches? And how important is it that everyone has access to scientific literature, not just scientists and Al Gore?

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A few caveats

?Although PubMed can be incredibly helpful, it isn’t useful for the 95% of people who don’t know how to read studies, don’t have academic access to journals, or are intimidated by the sheer size of PubMed.

There’s also a very real chance that more and more people will eschew PubMed in favor of AI answering their health questions. This will, as you may predict, be fraught with peril due the complexity and nuance inherent in biomedical science and AI’s habit of making things up.?

If you ever get annoyed at the 3,227 PubMed results you have to sort through, just remember: we have soooooo much more health-related information at our fingertips than previous generations. Search interface issues are really just minor inconveniences in the grand scheme of things. Go forth and explore … there’s literally always something new and fascinating to learn about health and the human body.

Still, what if there was a middle ground between vast dusty archives and a hallucinating robot?

Our team is working on a cool way to make Examine’s interface much easier to use, so that you can more quickly and accurately find answers on our site. We may not be PubMed, but we’re also a lot easier to read. Stay tuned.

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Sincerely,

Kamal Patel Co-founder, Examine