advice when you search for infomation

[Guest guest]

Hi,

As someone who had chosen RAI after years on ATD, I have not much

advice to give in terms of how to manage ATD dose or monitor your

blood work. This group can provide more help on that part.

However, as a scientist in bio-medical research for over 10 years, I

do have some feasible advice to give out about searching for

information to make decision.

1. google.com is the best search engine, but it might not be the

best place for you to find Graves disease information. Through

google.com, you might be able to reach a lot of education

information, however, these information might not be complete or

objective. Some of these information might not be the current view in

medical field, it can be good information, but it also can just be

some advice from someone who never had training in medical field. So

use your judgement when you are using search engines.

2. Medline is the place for searching for most of medical research

journals. It is a website from National Medical Library, where you

can search for publication for information. It can be research

reports or reviews. It has abstract for most of the papers, which

will be able to give you some information about the study or opinion.

that web address is http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/

3. When you search medline or pubmed, you can input either keywords

or author names. Please try Graves, treatment, PTU or tapzole, RAI,

or surgery, hyperthyroidism, hypothyroidism or others as keyword. You

will be able to pull out the paper list, which will lead you to the

abstract. Some of the papers have free PDF file to download once you

reach the journal's web, while a lot of others require subscription

to access. You can always go the university library to check out the

paper, assume you have a good university library near by. If you

really had difficulty to get it, you can always post here to ask me

for help.

4. We are trained to be subjective to working in the scientific

field, while human errors sometimes may not be avoidable. My post of

the literature list might only consist part of the list I had, which

someone here called it " filtration " . So go to the pubmed and check

out by yourself, then you will have more subjective views about

current views in terms of managing Graves disease. Be sure to also

read the papers and reviews from European, Japan and Hong Kong, where

ATD research might be further and much thorough than it in USA. Be

sure to check for information about long term on ATD and its benefits

in remission, there have been several sounding clinical trials out

there, which might disappoint a lot of ATD believers.

Still, keep your thyroid if you can get ATD to work. That will be the

best. However, not everyone is that lucky. If it did not work out,

there are other options you can choose, which might not be as

dangerous as people might have assumed or people have told you. Be

sure to check these options too should ATD fails.

If we only tell the newbies one side of story, we are no different

from these endos who rushed people into RAI without telling patients

about other options.

Best wishes,

Liang