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.