Forgotten Research, and other interesting developments
September 7, 2010 5:35 PM Subscribe
Forgotten Research, and other interesting developments
Many medical interventions, including drugs, procedures, and other therapeutic initiatives, have been studied in the past and found to be effective for some condition or another, only to be lost to the sands of time as researchers move on to other topics and more well-known interventions become dominant. Similarly, many new and promising interventions are hampered from gaining wider acceptance due to the fact that there is often scant literature to be found. This is often the case with research on generic drugs, which does not generally have the benefit of pharmaceutical industry backing to provide funds and exposure. I'm a medical student, and by creating this site, I hope to catalog all the interesting tidbits of forgotten and obscure research that still hold promise for yielding effective treatments now and in the future. While the pickings are a bit slim at present, I aim to add lots of interesting and underappreciated bits of research as time passes!
Contributors welcome; send me a MeMail or use the email address provided on the website. I tend to come across these interesting findings at random, without realizing how I stumbled across a particular paper, so any and all help is appreciated!
Many medical interventions, including drugs, procedures, and other therapeutic initiatives, have been studied in the past and found to be effective for some condition or another, only to be lost to the sands of time as researchers move on to other topics and more well-known interventions become dominant. Similarly, many new and promising interventions are hampered from gaining wider acceptance due to the fact that there is often scant literature to be found. This is often the case with research on generic drugs, which does not generally have the benefit of pharmaceutical industry backing to provide funds and exposure. I'm a medical student, and by creating this site, I hope to catalog all the interesting tidbits of forgotten and obscure research that still hold promise for yielding effective treatments now and in the future. While the pickings are a bit slim at present, I aim to add lots of interesting and underappreciated bits of research as time passes!
Contributors welcome; send me a MeMail or use the email address provided on the website. I tend to come across these interesting findings at random, without realizing how I stumbled across a particular paper, so any and all help is appreciated!
Thanks for the comments! Will definitely incorporate some of them when I have some more time on my hands!
posted by greatgefilte at 6:27 PM on October 7, 2010
posted by greatgefilte at 6:27 PM on October 7, 2010
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1--It would be great to just be able to browse all your entries alphabetically by title or author or year.
2--I think it would be helpful to have some links to pages that describe how to assess the medical literature. As it is, you're just kind of assuming that all of these are "good" studies, but that may not be true.
3--Relatedly, you might want to add a paragraph about the concept of publication bias--that is, that researchers (and/or journals) may not publish negative or null studies, so there's no way of knowing for a particular outcome whether the one or two studies that have promising results are the only ones of many others that had disappointing or null results, and just weren't ever documented formally.
4--It might be fun to try to think about old remedies that were discounted, but now are more accepted thanks to modern research. I'm thinking about medical leeches as a good example, but I'm sure there are others.
Finally, don't forget about scholar.google.com as a resource. It often includes things outside the PubMed realm.
posted by gubenuj at 8:01 PM on September 30, 2010