Tuesday 21 June 2011

Doing Your Own Cancer Research


Without wanting to make a fetish of peer review, it still stands that any serious research on cancer treatments will have been published in a scientific journal. Something published on a web-site or forum and without supporting evidence has to be treated with a huge amount of scepticism. What it says may be true, but you need to know the evidence – and that doesn't mean anonymous web users reporting second hand stories of what works (or doesn't work).

Pubmed is the best place to start when looking for published research. You'll find everything here, from studies on curcumin, resveratrol, glutamine, methyl jasmonate to the latest in chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and surgery and so on. If you've not got the scientific training you can still learn a lot from reading the abstract and discussion sections of a paper. For help in interpreting the results that are listed a good place to go is the Anticancer.org.uk site, particularly the 'How To Read A Cancer Paper' article.

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