RESEARCH

“Our patients aren’t helped by our ‘skills’ nearly so much as they are
by the depth of our understanding.” – Barrett Dorko, PT

It is often stated that medical practices are both science and art. Essential to any art is a precise understanding of the materials in use. Unfortunately for us, human perceptual mechanisms function in ways that often lead to substantial misinterpretations of the world around us. With a natural tendency to be wrong, gaining the most accurate understanding of natural phenomena and processes -in this case, the human body- can be a significant challenge. The scientific method has proven itself without doubt the best tool we have for minimising misleading interpretation when we seek understanding. Although science does not make absolute claims over truth, it can demonstrate that one answer is highly likely to be more true than another: it helps us to be less wrong.

Essential to science, though, is continual re-examination of our understanding based on new evidence. With medical science knowledge growing exponentially, it has become extremely difficult for clinicians to keep up to date with the literature without having a high level of information literacy. The are a number of excellent internet services and resources available now that mean the time dedication necessary to follow professional interests and important advances in one’s field is a only fraction of what it used to be. There’s still the frustrating issue of fulltext accessibility for those of us without subscriptions to hundreds of journals or the fulltext databases, but with more and more free access journals and free content appearing there is plenty of important reading available.

If you are a physiotherapist, acupuncturist, osteopath, chiropractor, massage therapist, or any other health professional working with people in pain, you may find useful the index of more than 60 journals relevant to your practice archived below. You can ‘View all’ of the updates in a category via my Google Reader feed, visit the RSS feed updates for each journal by clicking on the link, or simply follow the Latest Research Updates feed where I will be tagging everything that is worth a look in. If you have a Google Reader account, adding me to People You Follow will allow you to do specific searches across all of my tagged updates.

There are a few journals I like that don’t have an RSS feed yet; I’ll be adding them as soon as they catch up. If I have left out any relevant journals, please contact me and let me know. I’d also love to get some feedback if you find this service useful, or if you know how I can improve it.

I’ve added links to the most useful medical databases in the Research Links box. Of course, finding relevant research is only the start. There’s a good deal of poor quality science published, even in top journals, so knowing how to read and critically appraise research is an essential skill for clinicians – one that isn’t too difficult to learn. There are great resources at these sites:

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