Thursday, September 28, 2017

Treatment beyond therapy

So, every once in a while I do a search using "therapy"[subheading], and get some results but not as many as I wanted. Then I have the "bright" idea of trying some other MeSH terms. I mean, maybe sometimes the indexers forget to put therapy as a subheading, or maybe the rule of three applied, or something like that. Right?

So, then I go through a labourious process of finding other relevant MeSH. Basically this involves thinking of treatments and searching them in the MeSH database and then looking at the broader terms.

Here's what I come up with:

"Treatment Outcome"[Mesh] OR "Therapeutic Uses"[Mesh] OR "Pharmaceutical Preparations"[Mesh] OR "Therapeutics"[Mesh] OR "Mental Health Services"[Mesh] OR "Psychiatric Somatic Therapies"[Mesh] OR "Psychotherapy"[Mesh]

So then I take that and combine it with the rest of my search, and use NOT to get rid of the "therapy"[subheading] articles which I've already looked at.

Guess what? So far, every single time, it's added nothing to the search. This time, I got a couple of articles about chemicals which are used as therapies but are also endogenous compounds, and in this case there are some articles about how their regulation affects the disease. Fits the search strategy, but completely irrelevant.

But who knows, in a few months I'll probably try it again. Einstein had a saying about this kind of behaviour...

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