Health Care - Researching Genetic Defects
The many issues addressed by the nursing profession sometimes mean that a nurse will not immediately know the answer to a patient's question. Constantly seeking to improve the quality of care and patients' participation in their own care, a nurse understands that he/she is an eternal student and must develop excellent research skills. Those research skills should be developed for the internet and electronic communications, as well as written sources, in order to use the wealth of information provided by all those sources.
Google Advanced Search (Google, Inc., 2012) is an excellent and very fast source of information on a wide range of topics, as long as precise key words are used. Google Advanced Search is used instead of Google because Google Advanced Search allows the researcher to give exact, precise phrases along with other terms on other lines and gain information nearly immediately. Therefore, type the name of the rare genetic defect into "Google Advanced Search, this exact word or phrase." Of course, Google Advanced Search can give literally more than a million search results in less than a second, so another term has to be used to give a high level of quality in the sources nearest the top of the results; therefore, on the "all these words" line of the same page, type "peer-reviewed." The term "Peer-reviewed"...
Typing "Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome" on the "this exact word or phrase" line and "peer-reviewed" on the "all these words" line, then hitting return gives "about 16,200 results in .31 seconds," with references to peer-reviewed scholarly articles and an information page supported by the National Institutes of Health. The top results look like this:
(Google, Inc., 2012)
These top results are the most interesting because the second page is maintained by the National Institute of Health and the scholarly articles are quoted by many other scholars. Clicking the National Institute of Health page link leads to an entire "Genetic and Rare Diseases Information Center (GARD)" that covers a number of diseases, including "Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome," The page also has language that is easy to understand, a number of links to other information and even an invitation to patients and their families to…
