Module 2 Question1: Clinical Problem

The clinical problem I selected was based ona recent patient interaction. A 38 year old with Type II Diabetes and hypercholesterolemia recently lost his job as an engineer in Silicon Valley and could no longer afford his prescription medications and pay his mortgage. The pharmacist was attempting to find over the counter options for 25% of his pprescription cost. I wanted to reasearch and see how effective the following are for hypercholesterolemia: omega 3 fish oil, niacin and/or green tea. I wanted to review randomized clinical trials due to the fact that I wanted to advise a patient. I tried the Cochrane Librabry without success. I returned to PubMed and retrieved many articles for niacin, some for fish oil and one for green tea. PubMed was easy to search using the MeSH database and it was easy to track the search history. I don't think alot of research has been done on fish oil and green tea. The search in PubMed was not time consuming but it would be difficult to use routinely in a clinical setting. I found that it was important to take the time to plan the search and also to revisit the search strategy. I also needed to read articles in order to develop a more efficient search strategy. This would be difficult to do at work.