On Doctoring MEDLINE searches, with reference librarian comments

The question was

"What is the efficacy of treating chronic pain
disorders with antidepressants?"

Reference Librarian comments

Sometimes the "Medical subject headings (MeSH)" don't help us quite
right, and this was one of those cases, I think. When you put
"chronic pain" into the search box in Ovid, it maps to Pain and it
maps to Chronic disease, but there is no subject heading for exactly
"chronic pain." Given that, you used "chronic pain" as a phrase and
got some perfectly reasonable results. I've been doing MEDLINE
searching for about 800 years, so I tried a different trick. I used
"Pain" (exploded, and focus) and then ANDed that to antidepressive
agents, just as you did, and then ANDed to the word "chronic"
anywhere. That gave me a few more hits, because the system could
give me references to "chronic low-back pain" or "chronic
nonmalignant pain" whereas with your search it was only able to show
you "chronic pain" (the two words exactly adjacent to one-another).

You did a great job. There's always another way, etc. Down at the
bottom of this message, I'll copy the references of the ones that I
got that you didn't -- just in case this subject is still of interest.