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Individual Studies

Individual studies are the bedrock of medical research. They tackle very specific clinical questions and come in a variety of designs. For questions of efficacy and tolerability of therapy the gold-standard study design is the Randomized-Controlled Trial or RCT. (For a discussion of various study designs, see the “Studies” section of Classification of Medical Research).

While randomized controlled trials provide key information on efficacy and tolerability, trials that only enroll a few hundred patients are ill-equipped to reassure us on the therapy’s safety because these outcomes tend to be very infrequent. For example, death, liver failure and life threatening drug rashes may occur in less than 0.1% of patients, and a small trial would not be powerful enough to pick up these events. In the absence of large RCT trials, look for Cohort or Case Control studies, or perhaps case-series and case reports for information on safety (see more on these designs in the “Studies” section of Classification of Medical Research).

The following two free databases are very helpful for retrieving individual studies. PubMed is the premier search tool for finding individual studies (and syntheses as well).

PubMed:
Pubmed searches the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s MEDLINE database with over 17 million records from over 4,800 journals covering all fields of medicine (including complementary and alternative medicine), as well as the allied healthcare professions.
A helpful tutorial is available to guide you in using the powerful search tools available in PubMed.
When you run your search it will retrieve all types of literature published in scientific journals, including reviews, clinical trials, and letters to the editor. If you want to narrow what you retrieve to only clinical trials you can click the “Publication Type” tab near the top left hand corner of the page, to do so. You can then check the boxes next to the titles that look relevant and in the “Display” pull-down window select “Abstract” to display a summary of the articles. Most are somewhat technical in nature and aimed at healthcare professionals, although they usually have conclusions section at the end that gives you the bottom line. A few articles can be displayed full length but most cannot. If you want to retrieve the entire article to take to your healthcare provider and it is not available in PubMed you can make a note of the citation and try retrieving the article from the Free Medical Journals website below.

Free Medical Journals:
This website is a clearinghouse of over 430 journals where you can download the entire article for free. Some journals have a waiting period of up to 2 years from the most recent publication before releasing the free full text articles.

Once you retrieve the information of interest it’s important to ensure it is believable and reliable. To learn how to do this you can proceed to the Evaluate section.

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