Is the second-best treatment good enough for you? If you answer, “No,” then you need to be up-to-date on the very latest treatment developments for your particular illness.
While it is tempting to believe that your doctor will be familiar with all the treatments out there and the pros and cons of each one, unfortunately, this may well not be the case; I know this from personal experience.
Treatment developments happen all the time for cancer and just about all other illnesses. Doctors are not required, nor do they have time, to keep up with all the treatment and clinical trial developments.
There is a very real chance that a potentially lifesaving treatment for your illness exists now, or is in development, that your doctor does not know about. You simply can’t know unless you have the latest information on your illness. We believe that patients should be making their own medical choices based on the best information available.
You need to be the general contractor of your illness and its treatment. To take on that role, you need current, ongoing information about your illness and its treatment options. How do you keep up with the latest treatment developments for your illness? How do you know if a new development today, tomorrow, or next week might make a huge difference for your treatment — and ultimately your life itself? We can help.
Treatment Developments and Breakthroughs Worldwide
Government organizations like The National Library of Medicine analyze, code, and make these reports available through government databases. It is possible for any person with a serious illness like cancer to gain access to the latest treatment information for his or her specific illness. It is not an exaggeration to say that treatment information can literally save your life.
So Anyone with a Computer Can Go Online and Get the Best Treatment Information for Any Illness?
Well, yes and no. It is not as simple as putting a term into a search engine like Google and sifting through the results. The main government database, called PubMed, is available online. However, PubMed (formerly called Medline) is far from user friendly. PubMed has remarkably powerful tools for honing in on very specific types of information like the newest treatments for a particular illness. It even allows a user to do pinpoint limiting. For example, if I wanted to search for treatment articles on bladder cancer limited to those published in the past six months, doing so would be quite easy. If I wanted to restrict my search only to articles regarding treatment of that same illness but limit to surgical procedures, no problem. If I wanted to limit it further to articles that specifically addressed treatment of that illness for persons over 65 with a history of diabetes (or emphysema, or hypertension, or any other condition), still no problem.
However, the PubMed database is not user-friendly. It was designed for researchers and medical librarians long before there was such a thing as the Internet, or for that matter, long before there were personal computers. Someone trained in using PubMed could readily do the searching I described above. However, it would be very difficult and time consuming for someone unfamiliar with the structure of this database and the tools available to search it to find what he or she is looking for with good accuracy and completeness.
Biologists, Not Bots
Search engines like Google rely on software called crawlers or bots to “crawl” the web. Their function is to figure out which websites are about what topics and which are important enough to be placed in the search engine index. This works incredibly well for finding information on most topics. It works reasonably well for finding medical information, too.
However, when it comes to finding information that could quite literally result in a life-saving treatment for you, it isn’t good enough. Search engines have no innate ability to determine if a particular article buried in cyberspace is important in terms of its potential as a better treatment for your illness. The software analyzes words used in the article, the number of links to the article, and other factors that have little to do with medical relevance.
The PubMed Databases employ medical professionals like biologists, physicians, and nurses. They are tasked with analyzing and categorize every article included to make sure it is tagged properly for those searching the databases. An article can be categorized as applicable to dozens of searchable criteria, based not on popularity or word count, but on professional judgment.
So How Do I Learn About the Latest Treatment Developments for My Illness?
That’s what we do. We search the latest medical and scientific literature each day, looking for the latest treatment developments for our clients, and make that information available to them.
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