Subject: More Medline comments (Lundquist)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 132417 -0500 (CDT)
From: "Roy L. Beavers"
To: emfguru
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: 7 Oct 99 11:54:56 MDT
From: MARJORIE LUNDQUIST
To: rbeavers@llion.org
Subject: More Medline comments
Medline is a computerized version of Index Medicus, I believe. It is indeed
operated by the U.S. National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes
of Health, and is one of the genuine benefits that the US government has
rendered the public.
It does not index all the medical journals in the world. No indexing service
could do this.
When the indexing of medical literature began, it was the most "important"
medical journals that were indexed, naturally. This meant the most
prestigious ones (and the ones with the highest circulation) in North America,
the UK and western Europe, and mostly ones written in the English language.
These are mostly journals edited by people in academic medicine, and they do
indeed have pretty high standards for the kinds of papers they will publish.
Journals of clinical medicine tend to be on the fringes, as well as journals
in which health effects studies not of a medical nature are published, and so
these were not indexed much at first.
But the number of journals that are being indexed, hence available on Medline,
has been growing. For a long time, BIOELECTROMAGNETICS was not indexed on
Medline, but now it is; likewise for BIOELECTROCHEMISTRY AND BIOENERGETICS.
Both these journals publish studies of the effects of non-ionizing
electromagnetic fields on living things.
There are certain topics -- such as electrosensitivity -- that cannot be
researched using Medline, because publications on these topics occur in
journals that were not (and probably still are not) indexed by Medline. This
has caused a serious problem for people who are electrosensitive, because many
physicians who use Medline assume that it indexes all the medical/health
literature that is worth reading, and when they see nothing there on the topic
of electrosensitivity, they wrongly conclude that this is not a genuine
medical matter. In other words, failure to find a topic on a Medline search
tends to destroy the credibility of a person who is taking that topic
seriously.
Many people who are electrosensitive have great difficulty in persuading
physicians that their complaints are valid, and not evidence of a mental
problem. Indeed, many electrosensitive people have received undeserved
psychiatric diagnoses from physicians who could not imagine that their
patient's complaints could possibly have a real physical basis.
Even when the electrosensitive person researches the topic and finds the
papers that have been published in the journals that are not indexed on
Medline, and brings them to the skeptical physician to read, some doctors
remain skeptical, because they think that if this literature were worth
reading, it would be indexed on Medline; and since it is NOT indexed on
Medline, it must not be credible.
So there is no question that the failure of Medline to index every journal
that publishes medical or health reports does contribute to the ignorance of
physicians, now that Medline is virtually the only way that physicians search
the literature.
The good news is that Medline is slowly expanding its indexing coverage; the
bad news is that this is happening slowly, and many journals (medical and
otherwise) that contain useful information still are not indexed by Medline.
But, with the help of the Internet, there is nothing to prevent groups of
interested citizens from "filling the gap". While it might be expensive to
try to provide the on-line service that Medline does, there is nothing to
prevent interested individuals from selecting journals not indexed by Medline
and posting on a Web site the Table of Contents (title of paper, authors, page
numbers) for each issue of a given journal, in chronological order. Being
able to scroll down a list of titles is not so convenient as being able to
retrieve on the basis of keywords, but it is still very quick and easy to do
on a computer, and this would greatly benefit those people who recognize that
Medline does not contain all information and are trying to search the
literature NOT indexed by Medline.
So I suggest that those who are complaining get busy and start doing what
needs to be done! Who knows, it might even stimulate key people at Medline
(those who decide what new journals to add to the list of those indexed) to
select one whose contents have been made visible in this manner! -- Marjorie
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Reprinted with permission of Roy Beavers, http://www.emfguru.com