Emerging medical news junkies, I’m your family. I need to let you in on a few insiders notes to help you more easily navigate one segment of sometimes confusing and contradictory information: references to medical journals. I’ll get right to it:

* Stories often include “will be published in …” We (health and medical journalists) include that for the experts who are reading the news. Frankly, most of those journals are inaccessible to laymen who don’t want to pay a sometimes hefty price to read one article or spend the hours finding them. Often the title of the journal is a subtitle of another title. For example, I’m still counting all of the journals published by the Journal of the American Medical Association. If there’s a body part, JAMA has a journal. Or, just as often, a medical journal is named under the name of the publishing or printing company. Even the online journals, which are growing in numbers, are difficult to find on any search engine. In short, only doctors and scientists know where to find them.

* You’re not left out. If you’re totally gone into wanting to know what doctors and scientists know, go to a site called PubMed.gov. The National Institutes of Health and National Library of Medicine put PubMed together in the late 1980s as a clearing house for the hundreds of medical journals. There, researchers could study, compare and build off each others’ work. Now it’s online so you can get articles one at a time and possibly read the abstract (summary) for free. Otherwise, getting the study isn’t free and can range from $20 for an article to several hundred dollars for a subscription. And be careful. One of my physicians sources let me know that as many as 20 percent of abstracts don’t reflect accurately what the studies actually say.

* The good news is that NIH and NLM is working with the journals to make their research public fodder. Why? Because the NIH gives away millions of dollars so these guys can research the left leg of the rhino virus and not have to work a day job washing cars. That money belongs to you and me. So we should have access to anything they do with our money — even while they’re doing it. it’s not homeland security, is it?  A compromise is close (or sneaked by me?) that will allow scientists to hold on to exclusive rights for a few months to a year or so. Then it’s yours and mine — which in my opinion, it is already. The feds and the scientists will come to a compromise because this isn’t one of the issues that evokes enough public outcry to make any difference.