Anyone with a medical problem or medical question can now do sophisticated research on the internet to help in decision-making.
One of very best places to get started is the National Guideline Clearinghouse at:
https://www.guideline.gov/syntheses/index.aspx.
Beginning today and through January, I’m going to explore the National Guidelines Clearinghouse and some of the medical care guidelines with you.
The Clearinghouse home page above will get you into the thousands of guidelines available.
In looking at the Index of all current guidelines found on the home page you can quickly look through the guidelines published by almost all of the major medical societies.
Just as an example, I found the following excellent “Neurologic Assessment of the Older Adult, A Guide for Nurses at https://www.aann.org/pdf/cpg/aannneuroassessmentolderadult.pdf.
I found the publication by going from the Clearinghouse home page to the index which provides a complete guideline index organized by an alphabetical list of the professional society publishing the guidelines.
Just looking through the list is awesome. Anyway, one of the first set of guidelines I noticed was from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. There are nutrition practice guidelines for heart failure, celiac disease, chronic kidney disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and oncology among a long list.
The American Academy of Dermatology has a useful guidelines on the treatment of acne vulgaris and a summary is available at the Clearinghouse site. The AAD has online the complete guidelines available at the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology website. To get to the guidelines type AAD guidelines into the search box.
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine has twelve interesting guidelines available through the Clearinghouse website.
And a summary of the first guideline example “Neurologic Assessment of the Older Adult” is from the American Association of Nueroscience Nurses.
Go to the National Guidelines Clearinghouse now and start exploring this awesome resource. Again, it is available at https://www.guidelines.gov/index.aspx.
