I like to stay on top of the medical research that is going on in my field and I’ve spent a lot of time doing in my life doing exactly that. This post has several tips for those of you who like to do your own research and like to understand exactly what’s really going on out there in the world of medical research.

The first tip is to use Google Scholar. This is still by far the best tool for the public to search for medical research. It’s basically a search engine that focuses on published medical research.

Let’s take a look at exactly how you do that.

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Google scholar is not unlike AI in that the better you prompt it, the better your results.

Regarding AI, and this is true for all publicly available AI, such as ChatGPT, they only collect information from publicly available research. It doesn’t see behind the paywall any better than you do.

So you can’t count on AI to be able to properly summarize the research for you (and there are some other huge limitations with AI in this arena that I’ll address in a bit). But you might consider using AI to help summarize a particular paper.

Recall that there were 87,000 papers just in the one small area that we were looking at. That massive amount of research is one of the reasons that we rely on doctors. But, of course, how many doctors have time to follow all of this for just one condition out of hundreds of conditions that they treat? Not many.

A Few Words of Caution:

Don’t assume that there is research on a particular topic, or that there is much research. Popular treatments and things that you might assume are well researched very often have little or no research at all. And the absence of research, doesn’t mean that the topic doesn’t have value.

What is means is that researchers, like other people, like to get paid for their work. And if there is no money in it, then they aren’t studying it.

Also keep in mind that most researchers, like most people, don’t like to be too different than the mainstream in their thinking, because that is risky. The glamour of being the genius in the room is a myth.

Let me give you an example that’s close to home for me. There was a geology professor from the University of Chicago named J. Harlen Bretz who discovered the Missoula floods that shaped much of the interior Pacific Northwest of the U.S. and carved out the Columbia river gorge. When he first published his findings, he was ridiculed. And that went on for decades.

It turned out that he was right, but most people weren’t willing to risk their reputation to agree with him. It took a long time before the evidence was so overwhelming that they finally couldn’t ignore him.

This is not a one off. It happens all the time. Even Galileo dealt with the same thing.

Next, don’t assume that the title of the research paper accurately reflects the findings of the research. People who publish research understand that headlines get eyeballs, just like in any kind of media. If you really want to know what happened in the study, you have to actually read the entire study.

That is very time consuming and studies are often very technical, but I can’t tell you how many times after reading a study that I’ve come to a completely different conclusion than the conclusion that the researchers gave me.  

And finally, just because there are a hundred people saying the same thing in the research doesn’t mean that it’s accurate. Once an idea becomes popular, people (and researchers are people too) like to jump on the bandwagon and repeat it over and over again. And studies have shown that this actually happens.

So, I hate to dampen your excitement for medical research. This was probably not nearly as helpful as you were hoping. I’m sorry about that. I had to discover the same thing on my own. I used to think that all of the answers would be in the medical research if I just looked hard enough, but it turns out that it’s a lot more complicated than that.

That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try. Just be aware of the challenges and the limitations. Most of what I’ve learned about helping people with IBS came through the clinical experience of working with thousands of patients, and not from reading research papers.

However, I still follow them, and I do wish you luck with Google Scholar. It’s a very cool tool.

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