On Doctoring MEDLINE searches, with reference librarian comments, March 2000

The question was

What are the current treatments for Morton's Neuroma?

1     *Foot diseases/ and *Neuroma/    results= 49   
2     from 1 keep 1-2,4,12,14-15,19,23-29,32,41-42,45,48    results= 19   
3     *Athletic injuries/ and *Foot diseases/ and *Neuroma/    results= 0   
4     *Foot diseases/ and *Neuroma/    results= 49   
5     *Metatarsus/ and *Neuroma/    results= 7   
6     from 5 keep 2    results= 1   
7     from 2 keep 1,3-12,15-19    results= 16   

Reference Librarian comments

This is actually a tricky little search, because there is no distinct established MeSH (Medical subject heading) term for Morton's neuroma. I can see why you did what you did, and I hope the references you found were useful. Thanks for participating in the assignment.

I decided to "play" a little with the idea.

I thought about it like this:

a) first I'll make a big set of all sorts of therapy aspects to any sort of Neuroma.

b) then I'll do a semi-advanced Medline trick: I'll ask for "morton" or, using the dollar-sign, I'll take any characters AFTER the "n" in morton -- and I'll use the dot tw dot (".tw.") trick to ask for morton to be in the title or abstract. ("tw" means text-word, to Ovid...)

c) and then I'll combine the two sets I've made, with the AND feature, to get the intersection of those two sets.

It turns out that I rather like the results I get with set #3.

Medline 1991 to January 2000

#
Search History
Results
1
exp *Neuroma/pc,rh,dt,su,th [Prevention & Control, Rehabilitation,
Drug Therapy, Surgery, Therapy]
930
2
morton$.tw.
156
3
1 and 2
21