Publication Alert

History Lesson

An article on the History of Charity Hospital appears in this quarters Louisiana Cultural Vistas, a publication of the Louisana Endowment for the Humanities; check it out online.

If you conduct research like this, you’re in big, BIG trouble

A recent article in the Australian Family Physician recently gave this librarian a myocardial infarction.

Meet Dr Q.
When a patient asked his advice regarding the discontinuation of warfarin after an episode of deep vein thrombosis (DVT), he used Yahoo.com to find an answer PDF.

You might be thinking, “what’s so wrong with that?”

Two words: Ellen Roche
In 2001, Ellen Roche, a healthy, 24-year-old volunteer in an asthma study at Johns Hopkins University, died because a chemical she inhaled led to the progressive failure of her lungs and kidneys. In the aftermath, it came out that the researcher who conducted the experiment and the ethics panel that approved it allegedly overlooked numerous clues about the dangers of the chemical, hexamethonium, given to Roche to inhale.

So what resources did this researcher allegedly search?
Look no further than Google, Yahoo!, LookSmart, and GoTo.com.

As a health care professional, you should AT LEAST conduct a cursory search in PubMed. It’s free. It’s authoritative. And on the LSUHSC Library homepage, you can use our customized PubMed link to get ALOT of added content and full text that you’ll never see using Yahoo! or Google.

Plus, if you kill anyone you can at least testify during the malpractice suit to having searched the biomedical literature. In fact, the reference librarians here can even do a mediated search for you. All you have to do is pick it up…and use it.

Library Newsletter

Check out the latest issue of the Library Newsletter. It’s hot off the html editor!

Pub Alert: Medical Education in Post-Katrina New Orleans

Check out this week’s JAMA for a commentary from Drs. Kevin Krane, Richard DiCarlo and Marc J. Kahn on medical education in post-Katrina New Orleans. This piece includes a table comparing the numbers of medical students, residents & faculty before and after the storm, which is available to download as a PowerPoint slide.

And for you old school researchers, here’s the citation:

Krane NK, DiCarlo RP, Kahn MJ. Medical Education in Post-Katrina New Orleans: A Story of Survival and Renewal. JAMA. 2007 September 5; 298(9):1052-1055.

TIP: JAMA is available full-text from the library catalog. Use WAM to login off campus.

Recently published?? Send an email to mknapp@lsuhsc.edu to be a featured on Pub Alert