Module 2, Question 1 Response

The clinical problem I chose was intra-abdominal hypertension. I used Pubmed as my electronic search index and since Pubmed is specifically medical- and clinical-based, it had extensive results on the topic. When I simply searched "intra-abdominal hypertension," I got 511 results back because it was a pretty general search. That number of results is good because it offers me many options, however, trying to go through that many results is painstaking and time-consuming. So, I narrowed my search using a boolean operator and my final search was "intra-abdominal hypertension AND sepsis." This narrowed search offered me 32 results, which is a much more manageable number.

For my clinical problem, Pubmed was great because it offers a great number of relevant and recent evidence based practice findings. It appear that intra-abdominal hypertension is a subject that is gaining popularity and attention more in the recent decades, so Pubmed was great to give me up-to-date articles. I appreciate that Pubmed is updated often and that the articles are offered as "from the publisher" even before all the bibliographic details are reviewed. This allows me the newest information available for my research. I like all of the search options that Pubmed offers to be able to narrow or generalize my search, such as being able to choose authors, dates, genders, topics, etc. It appears that it is a great electronic index for most fairly general clinical problems. I imagine that if the clinical problem becomes fairly specific in way of geographic location, population, or rare diseases, etc, there might be some problems finding all the available literature. These very specialized clinical problems might present possible barriers in the use of Pubmed in daily practice. Also, if a practitioner does not have access to an affiliation with permission to receive all the full text articles, this might present another barrier.